The faint smile that stretched her red-stained lips, as if she wasn’t afraid to die if it meant her daughter lived.
Emory rejected it—this notion that anyone should have to die for her. Sidraeus had been willing to give up his life to save her, and now her mother, too, this woman who had already given up so much to protect her…
Enough.
The healing magic she’d grown up feeling so mediocre with poured out of Emory like a song echoing across the oceans of time that had once separated her and her mother. “Stay with me,” she pleaded. “Don’t leave me again.”
She felt like the young girl she’d once been, who’d looked out her lighthouse window time and time again, waiting for the sailor she’d always known would never come back.
But Luce had come back, and Emory refused to let her go.
64BAZ
THE RIB BONE WAS STILLin Clover’s hand when Kai ripped him off Luce and shoved him to the ground. Baz couldn’t begin to make sense of it—Luce, dying in Emory’s arms. Emory’s cries, slicing through his heart. But then, a gasp. Luce’s throat patched up, healed by Emory. The two of them clinging to each other in a pool of blood.Alive.
The sight of Kai pummeling Clover with all the rage and grief of someone who hadn’t yet realized the Dreamer wasn’t dead broke through Baz’s paralysis. He moved in tandem with Farran, both of them pulling Kai back from the wretched monster before them.
Weakly, Clover drew himself to his knees. His face was painted in red flecks from Luce’s slashed neck, and his own blood spilled from his mouth and the wounds in his chest, black and oozing. His gaze landed on Luce, the sight of her alive making his shoulders slump. Not in defeat, Baz thought, butrelief.
Clover had never looked so helpless as Cordelia’s name tumbled from his lips. It stirred something in Baz, to know that after all thistime, until the very end, Clover still thought of her. This was still his twisted way of protecting her. Of trying to better the world for her.
Cordelia had been the one person he’d wanted to save in this world, and the person he’d ended up becoming a monster for.
Farran knelt at Clover’s side and grabbed hold of his hand, his face devastated. Clover looked at him as if he could see through the unrecognizable features to the boy he’d known at Aldryn two hundred years ago, the boy he’d used and manipulated and killed. The boy he might have loved if he weren’t so very monstrous.
“Do you think I’ll see her again?” Clover asked, quiet tears running down his cheeks.
Farran didn’t answer him, only stayed there, holding his hand as Clover’s breath rasped. Even after everything he had suffered through as Thames—even after trying so desperately to stop Clover as his reincarnated self—Farran still found it in him to be there for Clover in the end.
“Forgive me,” Clover breathed, looking up at the sky.
Whether he meant the words for Thames or Cordelia or Luce or all the world, no one would ever know.
Clover disintegrated to dust. Like a manuscript burnt to ashes, all of its words and thoughts and stories forever lost to the flame. Swept away on a breeze, never to return. Any trace of the magic he had stolen—from the keys, from the gods, from the souls he had bound to him—returned to the fountain in a murmuration of bright specks, free from their captor at last.
Everyone stood still as the gods breathed in their recovered power, appearing more solid than ever with their full divinity returned to them. The silence that lingered was punctuated by the soft, teary words Emory and Luce were exchanging as they clung to each other, their clothes soaked through with blood. At Baz’s side, Romie watched the tender scene with shining eyes, though something like remorse shadowed her features.
Baz turned to look at Kai but found the Nightmare Weaver hovering over Farran. Farran looked entirely stunned, kneeling in the ash where Clover had been. Tentatively, as if fighting against his better judgment, Kai rested a hand on Farran’s shoulder.
“He’s gone,” Kai said in a voice so soft Baz almost didn’t hear him. “It’s over now.”
Farran slowly lifted his face up to Kai, eyes red-rimmed and haunted. He looked once more at the empty spot beside him, his breathing labored, his lip trembling, as if he were only now realizing that Clover had been defeated. That this person who’d been such a fixture in not one of his lives, but two, was gone.
Not a person anymore, Baz reminded himself bitterly. A monstrous, soulless god who had wrought unspeakable destruction.
Farran seemed to come to the same conclusion. He nodded as if to convince himself, took hold of the hand Kai extended to him, and rose to his feet.
“If it’s over,” Farran said to no one in particular, “then why doesn’t it feel like it?”
He was right. The sea of ash was as quiet and desolate and ominous as ever. Clover was gone, but there was an evil that persisted, a feeling of decay that gnawed at the edges of Baz’s senses.
The ground beneath them lurched. A hole opened in the ash to reveal an endless darkness full of stars. In the distance, a tear in the air itself through which they could see a battering sea and rotten vines and storms trying to claw their way into the godsworld. It was like the godsworld was disintegrating before their eyes, pieces of the living realms and the sleeping realm breaking through.
Baz could see the familiar outline of Aldryn College through one of these openings—and the many faces pressed in windowpanes as students peered, wide-eyed, into the sea of ash.
“What’s happening?” Baz exclaimed. “I thought getting rid of Clover would fix everything!”
Even the gods looked stunned. The goddess of the moon leaned over the fountain, where the souls that had been appeased by Emory swirled and swirled, nearly overflowing past the lip of the fountain.
