Emory reached for her magic again, but Keiran’s grip tightened. “I wouldn’t do that. Not if you wish to see the dreamling live.”
He spun her around, keeping his hold on her neck as he moved to stand behind her, trapping her against his chest. Emory saw that Romie was being held by the umbrae, writhing in pain as they feasted on her fears. The color had returned to her face, at least—whatever happened before seemingly past—but fear gripped Emory all the same as she remembered Jordyn being turned into an umbra. She couldn’t let the same thing happen to Romie.
“Please,” Emory begged. “Let her go. I’ll do anything.”
Keiran grabbed her hand, and she watched in horror as the tips of his fingers elongated in shadowy claws, just like the umbrae. He sliced one across her palm, drawing blood, then shoved her forward so that she stood before the basalt columns, where the fungi and moss still formed a lock around the silver spiral and Aspen’s rib.
His voice slithered in her ear. “Open it.”
Emory suddenly understood why the door hadn’t opened before—what it needed now.
Aspen’s bone to act as sacrifice. And Emory’s own blood tounlock it—just as the four lunar houses had sacrificed their blood in Dovermere before she’d unlocked the Hourglass.
She remembered Baz telling her that eclipses were the perfect alignment of moon, sun, and earth. And if eclipses were what aligned all their worlds, made it possible to open the doors between them… her blood held all the power of that rare Tidecaller eclipse. It was a key in all the ways the door required it to be.
Given no other choice, Emory pressed her bloodied hand against it.
And the door unlocked.
Before her eyes, the columns rearranged themselves into an archway, through which she could glimpse the velvety, starry expanse of the sleepscape. She twisted around to look at Keiran, at Romie, who was still being feasted on by the umbrae, at Aspen, who lay prone on the cave floor, alive but barely conscious. Power still thrummed in Emory’s veins, but she was grasping at straws trying to think of a way out of this.
“What are you?” she asked, staring at Keiran-not-Keiran, hoping to distract him from the magic she was reaching for—the light from the stars behind her, all the bright possibility of the sleepscape, hoping to use it to unmake the umbrae and whatever creature stood before her in Keiran’s skin, the same way she’d done last time in the sleepscape.
His dark eyes flashed silver and gold. Shadows swarmed around him, as if in echo of her own gathering power. He opened his mouth to answer—and Emory unleashed herself.
The umbrae that held Romie erupted in brilliant silver light. Emory herself shone with it, veins rippling silver along her entire body. With the ley line coursing through her, she directed the power to Keiran, willing whatever dark force was behind his eyes to disappear as the umbrae had, but he was not so easily defeated. His gaze turned vicious. Emory amplified the blast, letting out afrustrated scream as Keiran remained impervious to her power, as darkness began to press in around her, her ghosts whispering in her ears again, goading her on, desperate for more moremore.
“Stop this,” Keiran said, seething.
But there was no stopping now. Her power tore through umbrae and rock and earth alike, until a grand trembling nearly shook her off her feet and part of the ceiling came undone, falling mere inches from her. She caught a glimpse of Romie’s face—that deathly pallor returned despite the umbrae no longer there to feast on her—and wondered, with abrupt clarity, if this washerdoing.
Suddenly Keiran grabbed her by the throat, as his ghost had in her dream, eyes aflame with something vicious. All the fight left her at his touch, her magic fluttering out like a candle, until all that was left was the darkness, the ghosts, the guilt. And Keiran’s fingers tightening around her neck.
He was going to kill her.
A perverse part of Emory wanted to see what he might do to her—wantedto see him take revenge on her, punish her for having left him to be devoured by the umbrae.
“Do your worst,” she said, feeling herself go limp in his grip. “It’s what I deserve.”
Her words made his features harden.
She might have imagined the darkness around her lessening, the whispers fading, the ghosts ebbing away from her in one swift motion as they drew intohiminstead. Before she could make sense of it, the sound of her name pierced through the groaning of the cave. Emory thought it might be the dream song spilling from the open door, calling her to the next world as it had brought her to this one. But no—it came from the opposite direction. And it was not a song at all but a voice.
Keiran’s grip on her eased as he spun around to see the newcomer kneeling at the edge of one of the steaming pools, one handdripping blood into the water and vines shooting from the other.
Nisha was here.
Nisha washere, and it was so impossible that Emory could only stare as the Sower commanded vines to knock Keiran against the wall and wrap around his arms and torso, binding him so he could not move. Virgil appeared at Nisha’s side, along with another vaguely familiar girl, the three of them bruised and battered but alive, and real, andhere.
“Nisha?”
This came from Romie, who had managed to pull herself up onto her elbows, face still blanched, but alive. Her look of absolute bewilderment would have been laughable in any other situation, but as Keiran fought against his bindings and the cave kept raining debris down on them, there was a sense of urgency that left no time for contemplating the hows and whys of their old friends being here.
“Those bindings won’t hold forever.” Nisha’s face was strained as she fought to keep her hold on Keiran.
“Quick, through the door!” Virgil yelled, pulling a dazed Emory along with him as he ran toward the portal.
Emory snapped out of it at last. The vaguely familiar girl—Vera, Emory recalled—helped Romie up and went through the portal with her. Emory and Virgil gathered Aspen between them. Nisha didn’t budge from where she still knelt by the pool, her concentration set on Keiran.
