The effect was instant; the witches scurried off, leaving him in Tides-damned peace. Kai knew all these witches wondered ifhewas a hellwraith—if a demon might have taken his soul, given his perpetually foul mood and the way his magic made him act out. The only reason no one ever said anything to his face was because he was Clover’s right-hand man, and no one dared to reproach Clover and his entourage.
It had started when they’d first come through the door, leaving Bicentennial-era Aldryn behind to step into this version of the Wychwood that was eerily similar to the one fromSong of the Drowned Gods. They’d stumbled upon the ascension of a witch, an adolescent boy emerging from the earth where he’d been buried alive for the Sculptress to unlock his magic. The boy’s eyes had gone pitch-black and his body had floated in the air, throat bared to the night sky as he took a great, gasping breath. This had set the witches into a frenzy. They’d screamed about netherdemons tainting the boy’s soul, had marked themselves as if to ward off evil, their fear growing rampant as fallen leaves and dirt and branches floated off the ground to swirl around the boy’s levitating form.
That’s when Clover had stepped in, shining bright with magic.Kai still wasn’t sure what happened, what magic Clover used, but it got the boy to come down, the leaves and dirt and branches too, and everyone grew calm as the boy’s eyes went back to normal, then closed peacefully, as if he’d been lulled to sleep.
The witches hailed Clover for pacifying the boy—the hellwraith, they called him, a witch who’d been touched by a netherdemon while he was buried. Netherdemons, they believed, were hellish forces from the underworld that sought to claim a witch’s essence. They were the antagonist to the Sculptress. The Shadow to the Tides, as Kai understood it. When a hellwraith ascended, they did so with magic that defied the usual scrying of witches. Magic that was deemed wrong.
A witch’s magic was always rooted in the earth. They tethered their essence to the physical world through one of the five bodily senses, while their sixth sense, or third eye, wandered what they called the astral plane. A hellwraith was different. They did not need bodily anchors, because their magic did not come from the earth, but from the astral plane itself. It allowed them to leave their bodies entirely, to possess others,controlothers; to move matter with their minds and levitate and even commune with the dead.
While the Sculptress’s magic was a passive thing, acts of clairvoyance that did not interfere with the natural world, magic influenced by the netherdemons was all about manipulation. Disruption. And because so many witchlings were suddenly ascending as hellwraiths, the coven feared that the netherdemons were getting stronger. That they were trying to slip through the cracks of the astral plane and into the Wychwood. The rot that had started was proof that something was amiss.
And so hellwraiths were being pushed to the brink of society, forced to form their own dark coven of sorts, with Clover as the mediator between the two groups, the light-touched hero whocould appease a hellwraith’s possession by taming the netherdemon within.
“Are any of them actually possessed?” Kai had asked Clover, with all the skepticism of someone well acquainted with fear and hatred from people who viewed his own magic as other. The look Clover had given him all but confirmed his suspicions: a hellwraith was only this world’s equivalent of an Eclipse-born, no more possessed by a netherdemon than any of them were cursed by the Shadow. And Clover was merely using this tension between witches to prop himself up in their eyes, convince them of his trustworthiness.
Kai surveyed the celebration now, spotting Clover laughing with Oleander or Asphodel—Kai could never tell them apart at first glance. The girl ducked her head shyly, hiding a pretty smile. Asphodel, then. She was the more impressionable one, always quick to blush at Clover’s honeyed words and stolen glances. Like a damn flower unfurling her petals under the sun that was Clover. It hadn’t taken long before the entire witch coven knew the pair was courting.
The other sister, Oleander, was stony-faced as she observed her giddy twin. Oleander’s displeasure at Asphodel and Clover’s courting, the wariness with which she regarded Clover, hadn’t slipped Kai’s notice. Nor did the way Clover’s mask fell whenever Asphodel wasn’t around. It was clear to Kai that Clover had no interest whatsoever in the poor girl—in any girls, for that matter. He was courting her purely to convince the witch to come find the door with them. And Kai had to give him credit: it had worked. They were leaving later tonight.
Kai took a long sip of mulled wine and made a face at the taste. He missed his flask. He missed the bitter, herbaceous taste of gin to dull out the sharp edges of his anger. He missed being in his own world, and he missed not being so affected by his magic.
He missed Baz most of all.
There it was again, that all-consuming fear he hadn’t been able to shake since Baz’s hand had slipped from his and the door had closed between them with a finality akin to death.Promise me you won’t go through the door,Baz had pleaded with him, as if he’d known they’d be separated. And Kai had gone anyway, ignoring his warning. No, he’d beenforcedto go through the door while Baz was made to stay behind, both of them manipulated by Clover’s Glamour magic. Right?
Kai took an even longer sip of wine, hoping to drown out the confusion in his mind. He was misremembering things. Anytime he tried to recall what happened before going through the door, it was like grasping at wisps of dreaming. Frustrating, useless, and downright maddening.
“Are you doing all right?”
Luce sat down next to him, and it was as if the churning of Kai’s negative thoughts stilled at her presence.
“Fine.” He handed her the wineskin. “Youlook like you could use a pick-me-up.”
Luce gave him a thin smile as she reached for the wine. “I’ll feel better when we leave this place.”
She watched the merriment of the witches with the same wariness Kai had. She was still pale from their earlier encounter with yet another ascended hellwraith that Clover had “purged” of demonic influence—using his Tidecaller magic to calm the hellwraith girl, who like all hellwraiths had been erratic in the first moments of her ascension, lulling her to sleep long enough for her to be handed over to the hellwraith coven. Discarded of like a plague victim.
“We both know this place isn’t the problem,” Kai said tightly, eyes darting to Clover.
“Don’t say that.”
Luce’s voice was an indignant whisper, her eyes wide as she glanced at Clover like she thought he might have heard them. But this was the reality of Clover putting on these great shows of power to subdue hellwraiths: it was never him who was left depleted of energy, but Kai and Luce.
When Clover used his magic in big ways, Luce’s face would become ash white, as if all the blood suddenly left her body. She’d even passed out once. And Kai… He realized he could see darkness rippling off Clover, clinging to him when he plunged into his Tidecaller magic. Almost as if he were about to Collapse… but never did. Because that darkness seeped into Kai instead.
The same way Kai would absorb darkness from a nightmare. Except the darkness wasn’t coming from a nightmare, but Clover himself.
At first, Clover seemed oblivious to the fact. And when Kai brought it up, he waved him off, insisting Kai and Luce must simply be vulnerable to the demonic energies roaming free in the Wychwood. Once they left, they would feel better.
But they all knew better. They all felt it, this bond between them. A triad of power. Tidecaller, Dreamer, Nightmare Weaver.
Perhaps the truth of that bond was this: that Kai and Luce were conduits for Clover, sources of power for him to feed on. Clover gained strength from Luce, the blood key, and deposited all the dark side effects of his magic onto Kai.
And now the darkness Kai kept unwittingly pulling away from Clover was weighing him down, pushing him to act out in waking, and making the nightmares worse than they’d ever been.
Maybe Clover himself is a nightmare,Kai had thought more than once. A nightmare disguised as a dream, just as the Wychwood appeared to be. Spinning pretty words and grand promises of a world that could be healed. Words like flowers in a garden bed used to hide the ugly corpse lying beneath the rotting soil.
I think you were right not to trust Clover,Baz had said. But why that was, Kai couldn’t remember.
