“How can this be?” she asked. “You’re supposed to have been sentto the Deep—the sea of ash. Wherever our souls go when we die.”
A storm brewed in his eyes. “No. I was imprisoned in the sleeping realm, banished to the seams between worlds with no way out. Severed from my own body, my true form. Then this empty vessel came along,” he said, motioning to Keiran’s failing, bleeding body, “dead and useless to me until life was breathed into him again as if by some miracle. In his body, I could disguise my way out of the sleeping realm. So I seized my chance and slipped from my prison back into the world of the living.” He coughed up blood again, pressing a hand to his wound.
“If you’re the Shadow,” Emory said, “why are you so…”
“Fragile?” he provided with a gruff laugh. “I forgot how useless mortal bodies are.”
“Could you not jump into another body—a stronger one?”
One that didn’t stir such complicated feelings in her.
“What a brilliant idea I couldn’t possibly have considered already,” he said wryly. “Let me muster up all the power at my disposal and saunter into another vessel like it’s nothing.”
A bloody cough drove his point home.
“I’m assuming that means you also can’t vanish into shadows or travel through that liminal space of yours?” Emory asked, unable to keep the gloating out of her voice.
He glared at her. “So long as I wear your dead lover’s vulnerable skin, I am doomed to remain half myself, my abilities fading with his strength.” At her visible flinch, a cruel smile lifted his mouth. “Did I hit a nerve?”
Emory didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply. It was ironic, she thought, that the thing Keiran hated most should be what possessed his body. He had wanted to make Emory a vessel for the Tides to bring about the destruction of all Eclipse-born, only for him to be made a vessel for the one who had created Eclipse-born in the first place.
She didn’t want to imagine what the full might of the Shadow’s power would be if he were in his true form. Clearly, Keiran’s body didn’t care for the divinity inhabiting it.
“Now, I believe you mentioned healing me.”
Emory considered him. How weak he appeared, not the demon or the deity or even the once-confident boy whose face he wore, but a revenant. She wondered how long the Reanimator’s magic would last—if perhaps there was an expiration date to this reanimated corpse slowly deteriorating with the Shadow trapped inside it.
“Maybe I should leave you here to die,” she said. “You tried to kill my friends, after all.” Even though he’d savedher.
“Friends,” he repeated gruffly. “If you knew what those friends of yours carry, whatshedid to your kind, you might not be so quick to protect them.”
“She?”
“The Tides. The Sculptress. The Forger. The Celestials. If I have many names, then she has more. Like me, she is but one deity echoed across worlds. But when she splintered herself into pieces to keep her magic alive, those pieces of her lived on in those marked by her favor. Blood, bones, heart, soul. Always yearning to be put back together. That is what lives on in yourfriends.”
The pieces of her he had tried to kill.
You deserved to be ripped apart, and I will ensure that you never be put whole again.
Emory stepped back from him as realization hit. In the myth she knew, the Tides were said to have left their shores to trap the Shadow in the Deep after he sought to take power from them. Whatever truth there was to the story—a story that existed across worlds, just told through a different lens, with differently named gods—it was clear the Shadow wanted revenge. That he would stop at nothing to destroy the pieces of this multifaceted deity whohad trapped him. Pieces that called to each other through a song they alone could hear.
A song Emory no longer heard. At least, not in the same way that Romie and Aspen and Tol heard it.
All this time, they’d thought Emory was the scholar on the shores—the blood to Aspen’s bones and Tol’s heart and the guardian’s soul. To Romie’s dreaming, that fifth part the epilogue mentioned. Yet Romie was the one who shared an inexplicable bond with the other keys, not Emory. Romie was the scholar on the shores who’d first heard the song to other worlds, not her. And it was Romie who had true lunar magic—the power of Quies, the Waning Moon Tide, running through her veins—while Emory was a product of the eclipse. Of the Shadow.
“I don’t have a piece of her in me,” she said with bleak realization, more to herself than to the Shadow. “I’m not a key.”
“You’re a Tidecaller. That means you alone have the power to turn a key in its lock, and so much more you don’t yet know.”
Tidecaller, Tidethief.
But it wasn’t only the Tides Emory had stolen from. The magic that had called to her on the ley line had been the power of the Tides and the Sculptress and the Forger, pieces of a single deity entrenched in the friends whose life force she had gorged herself on.
She assessed the Shadow. “Is that why you saved me back there?” Because her magic made herhis, perhaps a weapon he might use against his rival.
He seemed disgusted at the reminder. “A moment of weakness on my part, influenced by this miserable mortal’s lingering feelings for you.”
“I don’t believe you.” Whether a part of Keiran remained alive or not in there, she doubted he would have cared whether she lived. “You didn’t just take a sword for me. You saved me from myself—from what the ley line does to me. How?”
