Romie stared dumbfounded around them, then back at Aspen. She was certain the witch wasn’t dreaming; she’d visited her dreams enough times now to know what those looked like, and this was about the furthest thing from it. And Aspen was certainly no Dreamer.
The only explanation Romie could think of was that Aspen wasscrying, though that still didn’t explain how she was here.
Aspen suddenly gasped, her face tilting upward, neck muscles pulled taut. Her hands were clutched in front of her chest, over her heart. She looked like she was in pain.
Romie tried to shake Aspen out of her trance, but when she touched her arm, the witch’s skin warm, the muscles beneathstrong, she realized Aspen’s face and body were no longer her own. She had shifted into a young man, beautiful and chiseled like a battle god, who in turn transformed into a beast twice his size, growing teeth and claws as its molten eyes found Romie. A low rumbling sounded in its throat. Flames swirled between its open maws—
Romie wrenched away with a start and stumbled out of the sleepscape.
She sat up in bed drenched in sweat, heart pounding in her chest. For a moment she was tempted to run to Aspen’s room, make sure she was all right. Wondering if Aspen had been possessed by the same demon that had overtaken Bryony—the same dark presence Romie herself had felt looming at the edges of the sleepscape.
But as she sat there in the dark, willing her breaths to slow, all Romie saw was the color of the beast’s eyes.
Not black, but amber. Eyes that burned like molten suns.
It couldn’t be the same thing that had possessed Bryony, because the emotions Romie had felt coming from Aspen as she transformed into it had been…
Not fear, but something like affection.
A bright, burning kinship that Romie herself felt thrumming in her own veins, even now. As if this odd pull she felt toward Aspen were mirrored in this fiery beast.
6BAZ
THE MAGIC OF THAT FIRSTsolstice night ended with the tide’s ravaging of the shore. They’d managed to save most of Henry’s things thanks to Baz pausing time, but as the tide pulled back out again the next morning, their party set out in search of missing lobster cages and fishing nets that had washed up farther down the coastline.
In the daylight, with the calmed seas and wintry sun trying to pierce through the heavy mist, Baz couldn’t help but see his surroundings through new eyes. These smooth gray rocks lapped by frothy waves, the white-dusted pine trees standing like proud sentinels overlooking the sea, the harebell flowers persisting through the snow—they were images of the place Emory had called home. Baz imagined her keeping an eye on the horizon as a young girl, waiting for her mother to return. But the woman she knew as Luce Meraude would never come back to Harebell Cove. In fact, she might no longer even be in this world.
The infamous lost epilogue that Kai had pulled from thesleepscape had passed from hand to hand these past few months as they’d tried to make sense of it. Baz, Kai, Jae, Selandyn, Alya—it was clear to them all that the person who’d left the epilogue in the sleepscape had to be Luce Meraude, otherwise known as Adriana Kazan. They’d found proof of Luce’s true identity in the journals Keiran had left lying around the Institute, and her being a Dreamer suggested she was capable of hiding the epilogue in the sleeping realm.
“You’re telling me I have acousin?” Vera Ingers, the daughter of a third Kazan sister, had mused. “I never had cousins. What’s Emory like? I mean, I know I met her at the equinox festival, but I didn’tknowthen.”
Baz had told Vera everything he could think of about Emory. All the best qualities. All the things he missed about her. Vera had given him a funny look. “Oh, you have it bad,” she’d teased him.
He often wondered if Emory knew the truth about her mother. Surely Keiran must have told her. Or perhaps Romie, who’d been the one to chase after the epilogue in the first place, had pieced it together.
This landscape was far from the sandy beach and singing tall grasses where he and his sister and Emory had chased after seagulls, but it left him with a pang of longing all the same. He suddenly wished he’d brought the sketchbook his mother had gifted him for the solstice, but it waited for him back at the lighthouse, blank and begging to be filled.
“You used to love to draw,” Anise had told him earlier this morning with a teary-eyed sort of fondness. “Remember all those drawings you’d give me? Characters from your books. The willow tree behind our house. I kept them all, you know. And now you can make new ones.”
Baz longed to pick up a pencil and ingrain this landscape inhis memory. But for now he picked up a fishing net instead, all tangled up at the base of a rock. Farther down the beach, Kai carried the remains of a battered lobster cage beneath an arm, dark hair unbound and damp from the sea mist. Kai suddenly stopped in his tracks, dropped the wooden pieces at his feet—and disappeared out of thin air, as if the mist had gobbled him up.
Baz’s stomach dropped. “Kai?” He picked up the pace, heart in his throat as he tried not to slip on the slick rocks. “Kai!”
“In here.”
Relief surged through him at the sound of Kai’s voice. Baz came upon an opening in an outcropping of rocks. A cave mouth, slender and dark. He could just barely make out Kai’s outline inside it. Baz took a careful step in despite the warning bells screaming in his mind. But this cave was nothing like Dovermere, only a small grotto carved in the rock, and not even fully enclosed; there was an opening above their heads that let a muted streak of light in, right in the middle of the circular space.
Kai ran a hand over the smooth walls slick with lichen. “Henry told me there were a few caves like this dotted along this side of the island. I found some of them, though most are collapsed due to erosion.” He splayed his fingers out beneath the curtain of sunlight, tufts of mist swirling around his fingers. “Never seen this one before.”
Baz hung back, a sinister feeling rooting him in place. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Kai side-eyed him. “What are you scared of? This isn’t Dovermere.”
“I know that.”
And yet he couldn’t help but think it feltexactlylike Dovermere—couldn’t explain the tug he felt on his magic. Or maybe that was only the fear. Perhaps all dark pockets of the world shared thesame sense of mystery, the same strange allure, the same inexplicable eeriness that would forever set him on edge after what they’d lived through in Dovermere.
“We should head back,” Baz pressed, adjusting the weight of the tangled net on his shoulder. “There’s nothing here.”
