“Maybe Ishouldhave let you die, if only to save myself from these incessant questions.”
“You need me alive.” For what, she wasn’t sure yet.
“And it looks like you need me to control your magic. Heal me, and I might find it in myself to help you.”
And damn her, she considered it. He was the Eclipse god, after all—did she really want to make an enemy of the entity she owed her magic to? He alone seemed to keep the darkness that came from her magic at bay. He alone might help her understand her Tidecaller power and how it related to the keys. The very keys whose magics she kept tapping into every time she stepped on the ley line.
Voices suddenly rose outside the cellar—too close for comfort. Emory held her breath as she listened.
“Sir, the blood trail was a decoy. We found theursus magnusbut not the Night Bringer.”
“Did you slay the beast?”
“Of course.”
“The Night Bringer can’t have gone far with that wound he suffered. Search the Chasm.”
It would be only a matter of time before someone spotted the blood that led to the cellar. Emory already had one foot out the door when the Shadow growled, “You cannot leave me here like this.”
She stopped, considered. She did need him. But she couldn’t trust him not to hurt her friends.
Nor could she stand to keep hurting them herself.
“Over here!”
A golden-armored knight had spotted her and was barreling toward the cellar, his sword at the ready. Emory made a dash for it, but not before sending a wave of healing magic toward the Shadow. The last she saw of him was his surprise as he glanced down at Keiran’s mending body.
He could deal with the knights on his own.
So long as he was alive, she could find him in the liminal space, get answers from him there. She could only hope he wouldn’t be able to get to her friends.
A dragon’s roar rent the tunnels, making the entire Chasm shake with the force of it. Emory ran toward it, recognizing it as the direction Tol had said they were going. She picked up the pace as she heard someone scream and knew it was one of her friends, suddenly hating herself for having left them behind in the first place. She got to the dragon’s cell in time to glimpse white-hot flames spewing out of the dragon’s mouth, the heat nearly knocking her back.
The beast seemed larger than it was before, and she realized it was no longer chained to the walls. The ceiling above it had come down, letting in a curtain of sunlight. She spotted a glint of golden armor scurrying away from the flames. Swords clashed as Tol fought the Knight Commander at the edge of the inferno. The rest of her friends were nowhere in sight, and she feared they might have gotten caught in the dragon’s flames or trampled beneath its feet or stuck under the rubble from the collapsed ceiling.
“Emory!”
Relief and confusion swept through her. The voice came from the dragon’s back—where Romie, Aspen, Nisha, Virgil, and Vera all sat astride it.
It is time for us to go now.
Emory blinked incomprehensibly at the voice in her mind. Tol suddenly rushed to her side, sword still in hand, the Knight Commander knocked out on the floor behind him. “Don’t fight it!” he screamed.
Before Emory could make sense of his words, the dragon’s talons closed around her and Tol.
Then it jumped toward the skies, unfurling its wings to carry them off to freedom.
44BAZ
FOUR STUDENTS WERE DECLARED MISSINGwhen no one could find Wulfrid and his friends the day after the party. A librarian found blood near the Vault’s entrance, in the same spot the Ilsker girl had nearly bled out. And because it couldn’t possibly be her blood, since Baz had reversed time so she never bled at all, the worst was presumed by everyone.
The four students must have tried getting past the wards while everyone was at the party—the same party they had vehemently refused to attend, wanting to focus on the games instead. Dean de Vruyes conducted a search of the Vault, then the campus at large, but there was not a single trace of them except for the blood in the Decrescens library.
Grim gossip swept the college.
“They can’t possibly have vanished into thin air from blood loss.”
“The dean did say the wards were deadly…”
