Thames had watched, heart pounding with a hint of remorse and a grim sort of hope, as the student flailed against Cornelius’s hold, head thrashing in the shallow bowl. Eventually he’d stilled. Air bubbles had risen to the surface. And Cornelius had waited, waited, waited, desperate for his theory to be proven right.
The student didn’t rise.
Next had been the two Aldryn boys, Wulfrid’s acolytes. A different method for each. One strangled. The other stabbed. “Since drowning doesn’t seem to work,” Cornelius explained.
Neither of them survived.
Only Wulfrid now remained. His eyes were wild with fury and fear as Cornelius approached him. This one was personal, Thames could tell. “You remind me of my first kill,” Cornelius said to Wulfrid. “He was a bully too. Maybe if I give you the same death he tried to give me…”
Thames didn’t see the Reaper magic. He only saw the light leave Wulfrid’s eyes. Dead like the others, never to rise.
“What do we do with the bodies?” Thames asked.
“The Treasury,” Cornelius said. “I have an idea.”
Thames panted with the effort of hauling the body up the stairs. Every breath he took made him want to gag; they had left the bodies down in the Treasury for too long, and now the stench of wet, decaying flesh spoiled the air.
“Almost there,” Cornelius said ahead of him, grunting with the effort of dragging Wulfrid’s body.
The first two bodies they’d hauled up were waiting for them at the top of the stairs. “Wait here,” Cornelius said, hand braced against the wall. “I’ll ensure the coast is clear.”
Thames watched him disappear behind the silver door. His heart nearly stopped when he heard Cornelius say, “This isn’t what it looks like.”
A familiar voice exclaimed: “Really? So you haven’t found a way around the very wards we’re trying to break through?”
Thames’s mind raced. That was Baz—and there, that was Kai’s voice that followed soon after. They’d been caught, and now everything would come to light. Remorse churned in his stomach, making bile rise in his throat. Or perhaps that was the stench of the corpses. He suddenly wanted no part in this. But then he heard Cornelius’s smooth voice, and Luce’s, and after a moment the voices disappeared altogether.
Thames’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. They’d been given an out. And now it was up to him to see the rest through.
He got to work hauling the bodies through the door. The library, thankfully, was empty. Thames laid the bodies out at the foot of the arch, following Cornelius’s instructions down to the letter.We’ll make it look like the wards did this.They had already drained them of their blood, just like the wards had nearly drained that Ilsker student of hers. The apparent signs of drowning were an added flair of mystery, easily blamed on the deadly wards.
When Thames was done, he fled the scene, welcoming the cold bite of night air in the quad. He spilled his guts on the lawn and proceeded to break down into tears.
Thames watched Cornelius’s nightmare unfold as they always did. But something felt different this night, as if Cornelius’s guard were down where it usually stayed up even as he slept. Cornelius’s veinsrippled silver, then black, before he transformed into a veritable monster. A dark, deadly power blasted from him. It turned everything and everyone around him to ash.
The world was dark and bleak. Lifeless. And it was Cornelius’s doing.
In the great expanse of ash, a light appeared. At first Thames thought it was Luce, bursting into the nightmare like a dream, a shining star. But this girl was not Luce. Light emanated from her as she stood against Cornelius, and when Thames looked at her, he felt a great sense of hope wash over him.
Cornelius turned to him then, noticing his presence in this bleak dream that was not quite a dream but a memory, a vision. Something not easily forgotten. His mouth formed a grim line. “Now you know, dear Thames,” he said in a small voice. “This is the fate that awaits me.”
Thames shook his head, refusing to believe it. He grabbed Cornelius’s face between his hands, willing the darkness of Cornelius’s nightmare to seep into him. “We have time yet to change it,” he said fiercely.
A promise. A vow. Whatever it took to keep Cornelius from this fate.
Cornelius kissed him softly, then said, “Perhaps, if we can create a Tidecaller synth like the kind that Baz and Kai described…” He cut himself off. “But no. That would require silver blood.”
They kissed among the darkness of the nightmare, Cornelius’s words making an idea bloom in Thames’s mind.
Another nightmare. The worst one Thames had been able to find. Umbrae flocked toward him, called by the heaviness of this person’s dreaming. Thames didn’t know them, and he never wished to, given the twisted nature of their mind.
Thames wasn’t adept at pulling things out of nightmares the way Kai was. He knew how, but even the smallest things brought himtoo close to Collapsing. But now heneededto Collapse. So he let the umbrae overtake him, and willed himself to wake—
He was in the Treasury, having gone to sleep here knowing he would Collapse. Knowing the blast would be contained behind the Vault’s wards. The umbrae screamed in the shadows around him, as if to contest their strange entry into reality. Thames glanced down at his hands. Silver rippled in his veins. And then he was Collapsing, the force of it burning through him so brightly he screamed in agony. He had to do this. He could weather the pain. He must—
Thames came to in a daze of confusion. His Collapsing had stopped, yet silver still swirled in his veins. Rising to his feet, he quickly got to work extracting his blood and mixing it with one of the vials of Cornelius’s Tidecaller blood that they kept down here for experiments. He infused the mixture into his veins, then waded into the glowing pool, heart pounding an angry rhythm in his ears.
He would not be another failed experiment. He would survive this and be reborn a Tidecaller.
