He coughed up blood, looking at his wound, then at her. Emory couldn’t stop the tears that fell down her face. Instinctively, she reached for her Healing magic, resting her hands on Keiran’s chest to take the blade out and heal him. To save him.
“Don’t.” Keiran stopped her with a light touch to her wrist, too weak to muster anything more. But there was a desperation in that touch, a pleading look in his eyes. “Let me die so that I can be freed of the stain he left on me.”
“You felt it? The whole time Sidraeus was in there?”
A plaintive sound escaped his lips in answer.
Emory imagined what it must have been like for him. Beingreanimated and then possessed by the Shadow himself, the thing he hated most. When he’d died, had Keiran glimpsed the afterlife, seen his parents and Farran and Lizaveta again for a blissful second, before being dragged back to this half-life? Would he find them again, if she gave him the death he asked of her now?
Keiran lifted a hand to her. For a second, she thought he would brush a strand of hair from her face like he used to do, and she found herself leaning into his touch, despite everything he’d done. But his fingers closed around her neck instead, not strong enough to bruise, but enough to make her mouth go dry with fear.
The look in his eyes was clear: he would have a hold on her always. If he couldn’t kill her here, then he would haunt her still.
And as the light left him, as his fingers slid from her neck and death took him once more, Emory knew that wherever his soul went, if he had one at all, it would be waiting for her.
PART VTHE SLEEPERS
KAI SALONGA WAS NOT SUPPOSEDto be afraid. He was the Nightmare Weaver, made to be fearless in the dark. But fear was all he knew as the door shut between the sleepscape and Dovermere. Between him and Baz.
The door wouldn’t open again no matter how hard Kai slammed his fists against it. He screamed Baz’s name until his throat sliced itself on the edges of it, until he tasted blood and all the defenses around his heart shattered at his feet like glass. He fell, defeated, to his knees.
The stars looked on, mocking him.
A hand squeezed his shoulder. “There’s nothing for it, Kai,” Luce said in a quiet, forlorn voice. “The door won’t reopen. We owe it to those we left behind to keep going.”
The boy he’d left in the past. The daughter she’d abandoned in the future. How would they ever make their way back to them now?
“Come along, you two,” Clover called out in a voice that was far too chipper. He was already moving down the path of stars, his gait light, his grin full of bright confidence. “We’ve got a universe to save.”
Luce helped Kai to his feet. They stared at each other, him the boy of nightmares, she the girl of dreams. And as they started walking through the dark, following the only hope they had left, Luce said, “Don’t be afraid.”
But Kai was. It was impossible not to be. Baz was gone, and without him, the dark Kai had known became an unfathomable abyss.
There was no pretending here. No armor to hide behind. Only visceral fear and the certainty that he had seen the boy he loved for the very last time.
68EMORY
EMORY STARED AT THE DARKNESSof the sleepscape and forced herself to her feet. She had to get to Romie and Aspen and Tol before Clover could reunite them with the fourth piece needed to bring Atheia back. Behind her, Virgil, Nisha, Vera, and the two Golden Helm draconics appeared on the star-lined path, panting as they asked what happened.
Nisha fell to her knees. Romie’s name escaped her in a sob. Virgil pulled her to him, his face grim. Vera held tightly to the compass Emory had returned to her, staring angrily down the path to where Clover had disappeared.
“What do we do?” Nisha asked, a note of desperation making her voice tremble.
Movement caught Emory’s eye as the crowned umbra hovered nearby, quiet as a wraith. Sidraeus. He wasn’t gone, had simply left his vessel behind now that he was back in the sleepscape.
Conflicting emotions warred inside Emory. She could have used his help now more than ever, but without a vessel, he wouldhave to remain here, formless. And maybe that was a good thing. Because the alternative was him regaining his true form—which meant Atheia was back, and her friends were dead.
She would not let that happen.
The crowned umbra seemed to realize the same thing. Something passed between them, an understanding that this wouldn’t be the last time they saw each other, for better or worse.
And then Sidraeus slunk back into the darkness he had come from.
“We go to the next world,” Emory said to her friends with renewed conviction. “We find Romie and Aspen and Tol, no matter what. Then we storm the godsworld,” she vowed, “and we make Cornus Clover pay.”
69BAZ
BAZ SAT IN HIS FAVORITEspot in the Decrescens library, at the small table where he and Emory would speculate two hundred years from now about her Tidecaller powers. Above him, a shaft of rare wintry sunlight made the stained-glass window come alive, softening the deep purple of the poppies it portrayed. The lunar flower he associated most with his sister.
