She thought of Nisha. Of her father and mother. Of Emory and Baz and Kai, all these people she’d let down and who had fought for her anyway. Now it was her turn to fight for them.
You’re not in control anymore,she told Atheia, pushing her consciousness to the same depthsshehad been imprisoned in.
With one last shove, Atheia’s screaming subsided—and in a sudden, dizzying breath, Romie was free.
The magic Atheia had been about to unleash faded just as quickly, the dagger slipped from her hand, and all the fight left Romie as she fell to her knees. “I’m so sorry,” she breathed.
Baz gaped at her. From the look in his eyes, she knew he sawher. Not Atheia, not the cruel deity, but his sister. He swallowed her up in a hug, and she broke down against him. A sob escaped her lips. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“I’m sorry too,” Baz said.
“You? For what?”
“For Collapsing that day at the printing press. Sending Dad to the Institute. Breaking our family apart.”
“That wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you that.”
They clung to each other. There was nothing to forgive for either of them. They were family—and that meant they would love each other no matter what.
Romie drew away from Baz to look at Emory. Her friend appeared utterly spent, but she was still trying. Clover barely spared a glance at her, too caught up in his efforts to kill what was left of the gods.
Until Emory erupted in brilliant light that made Clover falter.
63EMORY
POWER COULD BE TAKEN, ANDso Emory would take it away from Clover once and for all.
She tapped into the essence of the keys as she might have once done with Romie, Aspen, and Tol, felt them coursing through her veins. Her mother stood at her side, and Emory could sense the residual echo of Atheia that her blood carried, a hunch they’d all had that proved true now. Luce told her to take it—to tap into this faint trickle of power she carried—and so Emory gently pried it from her, careful not to weaken her mother like she had weakened Romie in the past.
Fueled by the old keys, she called on the ungodly power within Clover, desperate to take it away from him—all the magic he’d stolen from keys and gods and every soul he had ever done violence to or betrayed.
Clover was too strong. The gods had been right: even with the power of the previous keys fueling her, Emory was no match for him.
But if she were to sever his link to his source of power…
The souls of the dead were as relentless as they had been in the abyss, and more so now than ever. They did not whisper to her as they did then, begging to be used, to befreed; they were Clover’s now, and his alone, trapped in a sort of twisted symbiotic relationship with him. They made him the god that he was, and through him, their power continued to flow. Through him, they got to taste magic—life—however corrupt. They grew angrier, more restless, feeding on his own anger. And he grew fouler with that venom coursing through him.
Emory hadn’t wanted their ghostly power, and she was glad she hadn’t let them anywhere near her. But this couldn’t go on. She needed to stop them, to stop him.
She caught sight ofhisfeatures among the throng of ghosts. Keiran. It didn’t matter then, the bad choices he had made, the vile things he had done. He and all of these souls deserved a second chance. An opportunity to rest, if that’s what they desired, or to try again.
In her mind, Emory heard Sidraeus telling her she would have to put to rest the sacrificed Tidecallers, much like she had healed the umbrae that first time she’d crossed through the space between worlds.
Maybe it was what she needed to do with these souls, too, for balance to be restored, for Clover to be destroyed.
But they were an unshakable force against the small power she wielded, even with the three keys she was drawing on, even with her mother at her side lending her strength. Emory needed more, so she opened herself up to powers that went beyond the keys, calling on the magic of every being who bore a trace of Sidraeus’s might—not only the Eclipse-born, but their otherworldly equivalents, too, the hellwraiths and eldritch beasts and Songless who were all a result of the clashing vision between two creators,products of liminality that would never have existed without Sidraeus and Atheia both.
They were all the same, in the end. Desperate to not only survive, but to belong.
Emory could feel their familiar magic rush through her, making her shine with brilliant light. She wasn’t stealing power from them; it was like when she had borrowed power from Romie, Aspen, and Tol at the Forge, a friend calling out for help and receiving it.
Fueled by all their combined power, Emory faced the specters with a single thought.
Heal.
She erupted in brilliant light, and every specter it touched seemed to quiet, shucking off all the pain and hate and resentment and unsettling thought they had let fester inside them. Theirs was not an unmaking, but a release. They did not vanish, but flowed gently into the fountain, where they swirled and eddied like oddly glowing water, like fog over a calm river. The fountain, at last, was being replenished.
From where he stood fighting the gods, Clover faltered as if suffering a fatal blow. Power rippled and fizzed around him in an unsettling way, as if he were a live wire cleaved in half, cut off from its source of power. The more and more souls pooled into the fountain, the weaker he seemed. He looked like Quince Travers had the night that started all of this on Dovermere Cove, deteriorating before their eyes. He looked like Lia Azula whose tongue became emaciated, and Jordyn Briar Burke who had turned into an umbra. He looked like the witch whose bones had broken and the warrior whose heart had stopped and the guardian whose soul was sucked out of him.
