Clover slapped on one of his easy smiles. “Something like that.” He put the books back on their shelves and casually leaned against the frame. “Truth be told, I was waiting for someone.” He looked Kai over as if to say,Not who I was expecting, but you’ll do.
A hint of jealousy reared its head up in Baz before he saw the flat, uninterested look Kai gave Clover. “Party’s that way,” he said before rejoining past-Baz.
And just like that, the bodies were forgotten, an opportunity missed.
Despite being invisible, Baz couldn’t risk going into the ballroom after them. Too many dancing bodies to weave through undetected. But as he paced around the empty Decrescens library thinking of his next move, Thames came barging through the hidden door looking like he was going to be sick.
And that’s when Baz remembered the bloodstain on Thames’s jacket—and the doubts that would be creeping into Thames’s mind right about now. He had seen this before through Thames’s own eyes, from the memory Polina had extracted from his dead body. And this doubt, he might be able to use to his advantage. Get him to turn Clover in.
Baz started to follow Thames, but a sudden prickling sensation on the back of his neck made him stop dead. He turned, peering around the dark, empty library. He had the distinct impression someone was watching him.
When he turned back, Thames was gone.
Baz deflated. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Despite all his doubts, Thames was too enamored of Clover to turn his back on him. It was the great tragedy that would lead to his own death.
A string of more failures followed.
First Baz tried to keep his past self and Kai at the party after hours so that they could catch Clover and Thames in the act of killing Wulfrid and his friends, to no avail.
Next he sped time up to the night he and Kai had caught Clover emerging from the Vault—which also happened to be the night Clover and Thames brought the bodies up into the library to make it look like Wulfrid and his friends had been killed by the Vault’s vicious wards. But he failed to alert past-Baz and Kai to Thames’s presence, and Clover seamlessly managed to divert their attention so they never saw him handling the bodies.
Before the authorities were alerted and the bodies moved, Baz decided to damn the risk and seek out Polina. She was the first person his present self interacted with, pretending to be past-Baz, and he hoped she wouldn’t look too closely at the slightly longer length of his hair or the different clothes he wore. If she noticed anything off with him, she didn’t say, and eagerly agreed to come with him to the library, where he convinced her to use her Enshriner magic on the corpses of the four students to extract their memories so Clover would be ousted.
But Polina came up blank. “It’s as if their memories have been wiped clean,” she said, frowning at the bodies. “Could the wards have done that?”
Baz grumbled a noncommittal response. He knew without a doubt that Clover had wiped the corpses’ memories using his magic. Covering all his tracks like the clever fox he was.
Everything Baz tried backfired. But he kept going. Had to.
Wondering if the changes he sought to enact were too direct, he shifted gears and tried leaving subtle clues instead. And when neither Kai nor past-Baz picked up on any of them, and time kept ticking forward until it was the night they were to break through the wards and disappear behind the door in Dovermere, Baz resorted to blatant desperation.
He found Kai alone while past-Baz had gone to tell Cordie the truth about what they were doing. If Kai knew he was nothisBaz—at least, not exactly—he did not show it. Kai only looked at him with an arched brow, dark eyes glinting with amusement.
“Back so soon?” Kai asked.
“I, uh…” Words escaped him. Because here he was actually talking to Kai again, and for a moment, he could pretend everything was right. He wanted to draw Kai close, pull him in for a kiss. Get lost in his eyes, his voice.
But all he saw in the back of his mind was the thread of Kai’s life, cleaved by a fate worse than death.
Whatever you do, don’t go through the door.The warning was stuck in his throat. Would Kai believe him, if he were to speak to him so bluntly?
“Brysden.” Kai’s brows were knit together. “What’s wrong?”
“I think you were right not to trust Clover,” Baz said, opting for the truth—as much as he felt he could divulge of it.
Kai immediately grew tense. “What did he do?”
“It’s what he’s going to do. What he said about Emory bringing about the destruction of the worlds… It’s not true. It’sCloverwho will do that, not Emory.”
Kai studied him for a moment, expression unreadable. “Look, I know I gave Clover a hard time,” he said tersely, “and I know you’re dead set on thinking there’s no way Emory could do this, but you have to face the facts here.”
“What if we don’t have all the facts? What if Clover manipulated the facts to make himself look like the hero?”
“What about Luce, then? She had the same vision as Clover. I don’t see how both of them could be wrong about this.” He frowned at Baz. “What prompted this, anyway? You were team Clover a minute ago. What changed?”
I saw how it ends.“I just have a bad feeling.”
“About tonight?”
