The Girl at Midnight Read Online Free PDF

pleased, threshold or no. Echo gave herself a moment to adjust as the last lingering tendrils of the in-between faded in the air like smoke on the wind.
    “What’s this about a firebird?” Echo asked, rubbing soothing circles on her stomach. “I thought that was just ahuman fairy tale. Pretty sure I read about it in a book of Russian folklore.”
    “Every good fairy tale has a kernel of truth to it.” The Ala led Echo to the heart of her little nest, with its odd array of mismatched furniture, tapestries, and pillows. Bowls of assorted sweets were strategically sprinkled about the room. The Avicen sweet tooth was the stuff of legend. Echo had many a memory of losing herself in that sea of pillows as she begged the Ala for just one more story—and one more cookie—before bed. “And more than a few human myths are pulled from our own legends. You should hear the things they say about me. In certain parts of Serbia, they believe that a demon named the Ala eats babies and controls the weather. Baby-eating.” She punctuated the word with a short, sharp laugh as she settled on a wicker chair in the center of the room and beckoned for Echo to join her. “Preposterous.”
    “I always knew there was something fishy about you.” Echo set her backpack on the floor and grabbed a whoopie pie from the plate atop the small wooden end table before collapsing face-first onto a chaise longue upholstered with a burgundy velvet that smelled faintly of lavender. No nausea was so great that it couldn’t be cured with a whoopie pie. Voice muffled by the couch, Echo added, “Now, are you gonna tell me about the mystery paper you pulled out of that box or what? The suspense is killing me.”
    The Ala slipped the parchment from her pocket and unfolded it with careful fingers. “This, Echo dear, is the most important map you’re likely to see in your lifetime.”
    Echo sat up and propped her feet on the ancient cedar chest that doubled as a table. As was the Ala’s style, it matched nothing else in the room. She reached out a handand wiggled her fingers. After a moment’s hesitation, the Ala relinquished the map. It was small, with ragged edges, as if it had been torn from a larger whole, creases gone as soft as cotton where it had been folded. The colors had faded to a range of sepia tones, but the barest hint of blue clung to a river that laced through the center of the map, interrupted by a phrase written in neatly drawn kanji. Circled in brown ink that must have once been red was a modest home in the district west of the river. Echo ran her fingers along the kanji, and though her grasp of written Japanese was only slightly better than her Mandarin—which wasn’t saying much—she recognized the words. She’d seen them often enough on her own maps, tucked away with the atlases she kept in a dedicated corner of her room in the library. The slash of blue was the Kamo River in Kyoto. Near the bottom edge of the map, someone had written a few lines of text in neat block letters, along with what Echo assumed was a date: 1915.
    She squinted at the text and read, “ ‘Where flowers bloom, you’ll find your way, through the darkness and the flames, but beware the price that you must pay, for only the worthy will know my name.’ ” She scrunched her brow and looked up at the Ala. “I don’t get it. What’s so important about a hundred-year-old map of Kyoto with a weird rhyme on it?”
    The Ala took the map with reverent hands. “I know the Avicen who wrote it,” she said. “And I believe I know why it was written.” She stood, placing the map on the coffee table between them and went over to the bookshelf nestled in a corner of the room. Books were squished along its length, packed in tighter than they should have been. Echo remembered pulling them off the shelves after the Ala had taken herin and reading the ones she could understand. Some were written in Avicet, a language that still eluded Echo after all these years, but