The Shadow Hour Read online

  BOOKS BY MELISSA GREY

  The Girl at Midnight

  The Shadow Hour

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Melissa Grey

  Cover art copyright © 2016 by Jen Wang

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-385-74467-6 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-375-99180-6 (lib. bdg.) ISBN 978-0-385-39100-9 (ebook)

  ebook ISBN 9780385391009

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Melissa Grey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  TO BUMBLE, FOR KEEPING ME COMPANY

  PROLOGUE

  Rowan could pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love. It would take him ten years to admit it to himself, to gather the vocabulary necessary to encompass the complexity of his emotion, but he experienced the first stirrings of affection the second Echo stepped into his life.

  That day, Rowan’s mother had sent him, armed with a basketful of freshly baked cupcakes, to play with the Ala’s orphans. The cupcakes had gone fast, and Rowan was lucky to have been able to snag the last one, a fluffy concoction of red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting.

  When the human girl entered the room a hush fell over the children. Her uncombed brown hair made her look like a wild thing, and she clung to the Ala like an anchor. She had no feathers. Her bare arms looked almost obscene compared with the down that covered Rowan’s skin. Her big brown eyes zeroed in on the cupcake in his hand as if she were a hawk hunting for her next kill. She was so skinny, so pale.

  He extended his hand, the half-eaten cupcake cradled in his palm as if it were something precious. And to the girl, it was. Even if he had licked off most of the frosting already.

  She took it from him with a look of such awestruck gratitude that Rowan had promised himself, at the tender age of seven, that he would devote the rest of his life to conjuring forth that smile. It was a beautiful smile, and he wanted to preserve it. He wanted to preserve her, just as she was at that moment. Happy.

  During the decade that followed, he succeeded in making Echo smile like that more often than not, and she opened his eyes to a part of the world he had never before been able to see. He wasn’t good with words—they didn’t always make sense on the page—so Echo read to him. They would spend afternoons in the library on Fifth Avenue, his head resting on her lap, her hands carding through the feathers on his head as she read aloud from Dickens and Vonnegut and Rowling. He fell in love with those stories the same way he fell in love with her. A little grudgingly at first, but eventually with complete abandon. He tried to return the favor by teaching her how to draw, but Echo was hopeless. The poor girl couldn’t draw a straight line to save her life. Their love was as sweet as red velvet, as fluffy as cream cheese frosting.

  Now, looking at the girl who stood before him in the Black Forest, framed by a halo of fire, he could hardly remember that person. She was a great and terrible thing, a being of pure magic, raining destruction down upon them.

  Until that moment, Rowan had never seen battle, had never smelled the sharp coppery scent of blood in the air, had never heard tortured shrieks rise above a cacophony of death. The flames that engulfed the forest—devouring trees in a violent cascade of unearthly crimson and gold—licked at his feet, seared the exposed skin of his hands. The only battles Rowan had ever known were two-dimensional renderings of wars gone by, immortalized as massive paintings lining the walls of museums. He’d studied them for hours, head bent over his sketchbook, fingers blackened from smudging charcoal across the page. The imagining of chaos was quite different from the reality of it.

  Echo stood by a weeping willow, silhouetted by the orange flames behind her, arms extended low, palms facing up. Their eyes met across the field, and Rowan called to her, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him.

  The sights and sounds of the battle raging around him fell away. Echo raised her arms, as if she were about to ward off a blow, but what happened next defied explanation. Fire poured from her palms, unlike any fire Rowan had ever seen. The flames were as black as coal and as blindingly white as the sun. They were so bright, his eyes watered, and he had to look away.

  Echo had told him that she was hunting for the firebird, that she had a map that would lead her to it. But the results of her search weren’t anything Rowan had expected.

  The girl he’d fallen in love with over cupcakes and stories had evolved. Now she was something savage and fierce, a celestial beast framed by a blaze of her own creation.

  Echo hadn’t just found the firebird.

  She was the firebird.

  Holy. Shit.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Who are you?

  The question soared across the scorched sky, spoken by a chorus of voices that seeped through the cracks in the rocks that glowed like coals, that oozed from the pulsing hot brightness of the magma inching down, down, down to swallow all life in its path.

  Lava ran over Echo’s boots. She looked at her feet, dispassionate, divorced from the sight of the rubber and leather
bubbling and melting. Her shoelaces caught fire, but she did not feel them burn. Soot coated her skin, clung to her hair, her eyelashes, her clothes. The blue had been burned out of the sky by the eruption, and darkness descended, called forth by a veil of ash.

  Who are you?

  “This isn’t real,” Echo said.

  And that isn’t an answer.

  This was a dream. And in this dream, she was burning. Her skin blistered in the heat. Magma rushed around her ankles. It didn’t scare her, though it had the first time she’d had this dream. And the second. And the third. But by now, she’d lived through this scenario so many times, it was beginning to feel routine. All she had to do was endure it. Soon enough, she would wake up. She could do that. If there was anything at which Echo excelled, it was surviving.

  She ignored the question—she’d yet to answer it in any of her dreams—and looked toward the gaping maw of the volcano. She stood at its base, watching it belch fire and smoke and ash into the heavens. Screams rose from the village below. That was the worst part. She could ignore her burning body, but she could never tune out the screams. Every night, without fail, from the first night. The night she had opened a door into the world and let the firebird enter. She could feel it now, its wings fluttering inside her as if testing the limits of its mortal cage.

  Every night, the same question was posed to her, asked by a speaker with a thousand voices ringing as one: Who are you?

  I am Echo, she thought. She didn’t speak the words aloud. She knew the answer wasn’t correct. Or perhaps the answer was simply not complete.

  Lava crawled up her legs, past her knees, her thighs, her waist, consuming her inch by inch. In seconds, or perhaps minutes—time was so hard to track in dreams—it would rush into her mouth, her nostrils. It would seal her eyes shut. Soon, her entire body would be trapped on the side of the mountain, glued to the spot like a fly in amber.

  All she had to do was survive. Dying in dreams wasn’t the worst part. Waking from them with more questions than answers was. This was her fault. The eruption. The fire bursting from the earth. The darkness eating the sky. The screams of people caught in the middle of a cosmic dance that had begun eons before they’d been born. Soon, Echo would wake up and start a new day. But soon never felt soon enough when she was trapped in this dream.

  Who are you? The question was clear, even over the anguished wails of the people below.

  I am their end, Echo thought. I am their destruction. I couldn’t shield them from something I caused. I opened a door I shouldn’t have opened and now I don’t know what to do about it. I am alone in this.

  Then the voices asked, as they did whenever she dared consider her solitude: Are you?

  Echo had opened a door to let the firebird in. But she couldn’t help wondering what she’d let out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday night in London’s Camden Market was a sight to behold. Stalls were tightly packed into the space, each vying to be louder and more eye-catching than the next. Rugs of dubious Persian origin swayed gently in the wind, and the brash yellow of streetlights sparkled over an array of glass pipes on a nearby table. The July air wasn’t exactly what Echo would call balmy, but it amplified the scents lingering about the market. Her stomach grumbled as she caught a whiff of what smelled a lot like kebab. Maybe she’d grab some on the way back. Maybe she’d even pay for it. Last night’s dream weighed on her, but the weight had grown so constant she could ignore it if she tried hard enough. Compartmentalization, she mused. It was a hell of a skill. And if any city in the world could help her forget her troubles, it was this one.

  She elbowed her way past London’s bright young eccentrics, searching for the stall Jasper had sent her to find. She didn’t need to look behind her to know that Caius was right on her heels, shadowing her with unwavering focus. When she’d told him that she was making a supply run, he hadn’t even given her the chance to ask to go alone. He hadn’t wanted her to go at all, insisting that it was safer in the East London hideout they were holed up in—an abandoned warehouse registered under one of Jasper’s many aliases—but Echo needed to breathe something besides the stale air she’d been sharing with him, Dorian, Jasper, and Ivy since abandoning Jasper’s Strasbourg home and going on the run three months ago.

  With Jasper’s injuries, they couldn’t go very far. Ivy had done her best to heal the wound he’d received taking a blow meant for Dorian, but even she needed supplies. The second Ivy had mentioned she was running low on the herbs for the poultice she’d been using on Jasper, Echo had jumped at the chance to restock. If she spent one more minute in that warehouse, she’d lose her mind. She needed distance. From the others, from her bed, from the water-stained ceiling she stared at every night when she finally woke from her tortured slumber. Luckily, Jasper knew of a warlock who’d set up shop in London selling goods to anyone with enough of an eye for magic to find his stall.

  She scanned the area, letting her gaze roam over the organized chaos of Camden Market. Magic didn’t like to be looked at head-on. It preferred to twinkle in one’s peripheral vision, teasing with a hint of its presence. Since that moment in the Black Forest, when she’d welcomed the power of the firebird into her body, becoming its vessel, Echo found that she was more attuned to the subtle hint of magic in the air. From the corner of her eye, she caught a shimmer around a stall, not fifteen feet from where she stood. Before, she would have noticed only the faintest haze in the air around the stall, but now the warlock’s magic gleamed in the artificial twilight of the market. When she turned to look straight at it, the shimmer disappeared. Found you.

  She cast a look over her shoulder, meeting Caius’s green eyes across the crowd. He kept close to her, but not so close that it would look like they were together. His idea. The baseball cap perched on his freshly shorn brown hair and the thickly applied foundation that hid the delicate scales on his cheekbones had been Echo’s idea. He’d squirmed in the chair as she piled on the makeup, unaccustomed to the sensation of goop on his face, but if she had to wear a disguise, so did he.

  Echo reached up to adjust the blond wig she’d pulled on before leaving the warehouse, and nodded, just enough for Caius to see it. The oversized sunglasses and newsboy cap she’d swiped from a dozing East London hipster on the tube added an extra layer of anonymity, but Caius remained on guard. They were still being hunted, by the Avicen, the people Echo had come to think of as family. By the Drakharin, led by Caius’s own sister. By pretty much anyone with even a passing interest in the firebird. Never before had Echo felt quite so popular.

  The corner of Caius’s lip turned up ever so slightly, and Echo let herself smile back in response. It hadn’t occurred to her to object when he’d insisted on accompanying her to the warlock’s shop. Caius had proved himself an exceptional companion. Sometimes, they would go up to the roof of the warehouse and he would point out constellations to her, regaling her with the Drakharin stories behind the stars. She knew the human tales and the Avicen ones, but these were new to her, and precious. Caius never wanted to stay out for long—again, safety first—but those moments were special. When she was leaning against the roof’s cold concrete with Caius just inches from her, she didn’t feel like a person of interest, or a chess piece in the war between the Avicen and the Drakharin. She didn’t feel like the firebird, the one tool that both sides desperately wanted to control in the hopes of ending their centuries-old conflict. She was just a girl, lying next to a boy, gazing up at the stars.

  “Looking for something?”

  The voice pulled Echo back, reminding her of where she was and why she was here. She broke eye contact with Caius, who was now leaning against a streetlamp two stalls down, examining his fingernails, the epitome of nonchalance, and turned to face the man who’d spoken.

  If oatmeal were to take a human form, it would manifest itself as this guy. Light brown cardigan. Stained white T-shirt. Beat-up cargo pants. Converse All-Stars that had once been white but had darkened to a sad gray. S
andy hair that was neither brown nor blond. Everything about him screamed beige. The only thing that seemed off was the pair of retro Ray-Bans hiding his eyes. But since Echo was also wearing sunglasses at night, she was fresh out of stones to throw. Rolling a cigarette as he looked up at her, the man sat by his stall in a metal folding chair, legs crossed at the ankles and raised to rest on the table beside him.

  “Can I help you?” His Cockney accent was thick. He brought the cigarette up to his lips and licked an exaggerated line along the top edge of the paper to seal it. The cheap silver jewelry on his table was laid out haphazardly, as if he wasn’t interested in selling it. That suited Echo as she wasn’t interested in buying it.

  She fished a small slip of paper out of her pocket. Jasper had scribbled a symbol on it—an equal-armed cross, with a diamond at the center and small triangles capping each arm—and told her to present it to the man. It was the international symbol for “Here there be warlocks.” Under the sigil, Ivy had added a list of ingredients.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’m in the market for some hard-to-find goods.”

  The man leaned forward, dropping his feet to the ground as if movement was a chore. He took the paper from Echo, bringing it up close to his nose to examine it. Seconds ticked by. Echo fought the urge to bounce on the balls of her feet or anxiously drum her fingers against her thigh or reach up to scratch at the wig’s netting, which had been irritating her all night. Traveling incognito had been fun for the first five minutes, but the novelty had worn off, just as her patience was now wearing thin with Wonder Bread the Warlock.