The Girl at Midnight by Melissa Grey

Dorian’s neck, though thescarred flesh on his left cheek remained as white as ever. At least he had the good grace to look embarrassed. Caius wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve, hands still holding the two long knives with which he’d been practicing. They lacked the reach of a broadsword, but they made up for it in speed and precision. The blades were relatively plain, unadorned save for the long, elegant etchings of winged wyverns. Caius breathed deeply, allowing his pulse to slow. Dorian waited for him to speak, silent and shamefaced.
    “Please tell me we have something to go on,” Caius said, walking to the corner of the room farthest from where Tanith’s Firedrakes were training. Every Drakharin in the room had sworn an oath of fealty to him, but the Firedrakes were staunchly loyal to his sister.
    Dorian pulled something small from his pocket and held it out to Caius. It was a leather pouch, soft and supple from years of handling. It might have been purple once, but the leather had long since faded to a soft black. The cluster of stars embroidered on its front had gone gray from use. Caius reached inside, and his fingers came away stained with a fine black powder.
    “Shadow dust,” Caius said. “How in the name of all that’s holy did a human girl come across shadow dust?”
    “She used it to escape through a gateway the old woman had in the garden.” Dorian shook his head, sighing a long, ragged breath. “Damn trees.”
    Caius closed his hand around the pouch. “A human traveling through the in-between. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
    “Just tell me what to do.” The blues in Dorian’s eyeswirled like a maelstrom. Caius had never seen another Drakharin with eyes that varied with his mood. “I can set this right.”
    “I want her found. Round up our Avicen informants. Call in the warlocks if you have to. If there’s a human running errands for the Avicen, if she’s close enough to know about threshold magic, someone is bound to know who she is.”
    Dorian nodded. “There was one other thing,” he said, casting his eye to the side. The Firedrakes had gone silent. When Caius looked their way, not one made eye contact. He waited until they raised their swords and resumed training before he spoke.
    “What is it?”
    Dorian stepped closer to him, voice pitched low. “The woman gave her something. A locket. Jade, I think, with a bronze setting. It bore your crest.” He drew a small piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “The girl showed her this.”
    When Caius saw what Dorian held in his hand, it was as though time slowed down around them. His heart became a rusty wheel, sputtering to a tortured crawl. He was painfully aware of every tiny movement of his joints as he took the map from Dorian. He knew that handwriting. He hadn’t seen it in nearly a hundred years, but he
knew
it. Rose had never been careless enough to write him love letters, but she’d been an obsessive notetaker. Her cabin had been full of scribblings, from half-remembered song lyrics to vegetables she needed to pick from her small garden out back. There wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that Rose—his Rose—had written the words on the map. But how had the girl comeacross it? He swallowed, mouth gone dry. “And you’re absolutely sure it was a jade locket?”
    Dorian wrinkled his brow and nodded, slowly. Caius looked away. He had no desire to see the confusion written on Dorian’s face. There was only one piece of jade jewelry bearing his seal that had gone missing from his possession. It had been lost in a fire, a lifetime ago, along with so much else. His sister was the only person who knew about Rose, and that was a secret they would both take with them to their graves. Caius closed his eyes, and for a moment, he smelled nothing but acrid smoke and the salt of the ocean.
    “She has no right to it.” The words felt thick in Caius’s mouth. Unwieldy. “Track her. Hunt her