Gathering some provisions, she tiptoed away from her sleeping friends and the slumbering dragon. Ivayne and Vivyan were circling the perimeter of their camp, as they always did, but Emory would find a way to evade them, too.
“Where are you going?”
Emory’s heart rose into her throat. She turned to see Vera watching her from where she perched on a small boulder at the edge of camp, an arm tucked lazily beneath her head as if she’dbeen stargazing. There was no judgment in her voice, not even surprise, just faint curiosity.
“I have to find the Shadow,” Emory whispered, willing her to understand.
Vera didn’t say anything for a second. “You know they’ll be furious with you, right? Leaving when we’re so close to the next door. A door we needyouto open.”
“I can’t go near it until I get my magic under control.” If it was anything like the Wychwood, they could expect this world’s door to be on a ley line too. She wouldn’t risk hurting the keys again.
At Vera’s silence, Emory thought for certain she would go alert the others. But Vera only lifted the compass-watch from where it hung around her neck and extended it to Emory. “Take it. This way you can meet us at the Sunforge.”
Emory’s suspicion about who she’d seen in the sleepscape with Kai grew as she looked at Vera, but she pushed it back, not ready to open that can of worms just yet. She grabbed the compass and lingered, uncertain of what to say. Sudden guilt stabbed through her as she thought of how she’d been keeping Vera at arm’s length, overwhelmed by the fact that they werecousins. Vera had been nothing but gracious, giving Emory the space she needed to process this on her own. And now this. Another kindness Emory didn’t deserve.
“I’m sorry,” Emory said, hoping those small words conveyed everything she couldn’t bring herself to say. She vowed to herself she would give Vera a proper chance when she came back. “Tell Romie she can reach me in dreams.”
52BAZ
THEY FOUND THE SECRET LIBRARYroom completely engulfed in shadows, as if Kai had brought back the entire sleepscape from his dreaming. Thick vines of lunar flowers climbed along the walls, spreading like wildfire even as they decomposed, turning black and putrid.
Then Baz saw the cadavers.
They were piled at Kai’s feet where the Nightmare Weaver stood with Luce, trying to fend off the umbrae that formed from the gathering shadows and drew tighter around them. Baz thought at first they were like the reanimated corpses Kai had pulled from Freyia’s dreaming, but these were clearly lifeless, with rotten lunar flowers sprouting from their empty eye sockets and open mouths. And they were faces Bazknew: Travers, Lia, Jordyn, Lizaveta, Keiran…
Romie.
His sister’s body was as withered as Travers’s had been, as pale as the Ilsker girl who’d tried to break through the wards andthe Vanished Four that had just been found. As if void of blood, magic, life.
Someone moving closer to the shadows snapped Baz out of his stupor. Thames, trying to help Kai and Luce. But there were too many umbrae, and the nightmarish flowers seemed to grow and grow, as if trying to swallow everything in rotting darkness.
Clover came to stand beside Baz, face drawn with horror. He looked like he wanted to help, to draw on his own mighty power to stop all of this, but with the students at their backs watching the scene with dreaded curiosity, he couldn’t.
But Baz could.
He stopped time. The umbrae stilled, the flowers became immobile, the students gathered outside the door and in the library beyond froze. The only ones he left untouched were the people in this room. Kai met his gaze with a mixture of relief and—fear?—before turning on the umbrae and becoming the Nightmare Weaver, the lord of nightmares, his voice quiet and commanding as he willed them to sleep. The umbrae fell away to nothing, dissolving into dust around them like any other nightmare thing that Kai took with him into waking. Then the flowers, too, and finally the cadavers, until the room was just a room again, if a bit ruined.
They all stared at each other in the resounding quiet. Baz didn’t let go of the threads keeping the other students immobile, too scared to let time resume just yet.
Luce was panting as she looked between Baz and Kai and the frozen students with suspicion. “That kind of power… how are you two not Collapsing?”
Clover’s eyes glimmered with intensity, seeming to share none of Luce’s trepidation. “I believe, dear Luce, it’s because they already have.”
“It’s not what you think,” Baz said quickly at Luce’s and Thames’s fearful expressions. Clover alone seemed unperturbed as Baz explained the truth about Collapsing, that it was not a curse at all but an expansion of their limits.
Luce was hugging herself, glancing nervously around the room as if she expected the nightmarish scene to return any moment. “Does Emory know about Collapsing? When she said she was Shadow-cursed…”
Baz whipped toward Kai. “What about Emory?” Understanding bloomed in his mind as he realized whose nightmares they’d just seen, the mind from which Kai had pulled such horrors. “You found her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Kai avoided his eye. “I’ve spoken to her twice now.”
Twice.And this was how Baz found out. He glanced at the spot where his sister’s corpse had been and felt his knees buckling. “Romie…”
“She’s fine, Brysden. It was just a nightmare. Emory’s worst fears drawn up.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“We’ve got company,” Thames muttered, jerking his chin at the door. Outside the secret room, the students had started moving again, Baz’s grasp on his time magic having slipped without his notice. They blinked, peering into the room with puzzled expressions as they no doubt wondered if the darkness they’d glimpsed had been a hallucination.
