For a second, Emory could only stare at him, mesmerized by his youthful splendor, his ancient beauty. Tears glistened like stars in his thick lashes before tracing lines down his full lips and chiseled jaw. The dark auburn of his hair reminded her of a setting sun or decaying leaves. He looked like the fleeting calm that came before death, the elusive light you chased in the dark.
“You.” His voice came out in a raw whisper, his eyes full of an emotion she didn’t understand. Then it sharpened to something vicious, anger distorting his beautiful face as he snarled, “Youdid this to me.”
His hand wrapped around her throat quicker than humanly possible, but he snatched it back just as quick with a hiss of pain. Emory scrambled backward, away from him, heart thudding wildly in her chest as what just happened dawned on her.
Those spirals scarring his true form. His inability to hurt her without also hurting himself.
The pain will be branded into his skin as a reminder of what he has done.
The bargain she made with the Tidecaller souls—it had worked.
There was a blur of movement beside her as Clover appeared out of the smoke, blood running down the side of his head where he must have fallen. In his burnt hand was the syrinx. Emory had dropped it after the lightning struck, and now Clover was looking at Sidraeus with a feral sort of hunger.
“Submit to me,” Clover said, magic lacing his words. “I bind you to my will.”
If he knew the syrinx had already been used, that Emory had beaten him to the punch, he did not seem to care. Fear and doubt reared inside Emory as the syrinx transformed in his hand, taking on the shape of a glass collar inlaid with silver and obsidian. A delicate, shimmering chain was connected to it, and it slithered, serpentlike, from Clover’s grasp, pushing the collar forward to fasten around Sidraeus’s neck.
But Clover had no power over Sidraeus, who was bound now to the Tidecallers, to all Eclipse-born—and Clover was neither. Not anymore. And so the collar did not reach Sidraeus, whose face had darkened with otherworldly anger. The shadow he cast lengthened and took on the shape of the crowned umbra, towering over him like a separate entity. A clawed hand burst from the shadow without Sidraeus himself moving a muscle, and it yanked the chain away from Clover, shattering the collar on the ground.
There was a beat as Clover stared at the broken glass with indignant horror. Emory feared Sidraeus might vanish with the destroyed syrinx, but he was still here, standing in defiance of the monster who wanted to control him. He lunged for Clover, murder glinting in his ecliptic eyes.
Only Clover was quicker. And as his hand connected with Emory’s arm—her wards, she realized too late, were long gone—the two of them vanished in a dark, billowing cloud of dust,leaving Sidraeus and the temple behind, his name ripped from Emory’s throat in a last, desperate plea.
They appeared in a place awash in pale, dull gray light. Clover held her arm in a tight grip, ushering her toward a large hill of carved stone with stairs etched in its side in a zigzag formation. Emory couldn’t move away from him or call on her magic; her feet simply followed as if of their own will. Or rather, Clover’s will—there was no doubt in her mind that he was compelling her.
She was completely at his mercy. Sidraeus was not here, her hope of gaining any sort of advantage over Clover now lost. The keys would die, and her friends at the temple… Tides, what would happen to them now?
Out of the corner of her eye, Emory drank in every detail of her surroundings. She knew where they were, and it truly was deserving of the name they all knew it by: the sea of ash, a barren world full of nothingness that stretched as far as the eye could see.
They started up the narrow, steep stairs. Atop the hill, she could just make out a gigantic fountain, though nothing flowed from it. It was dried up, like everything else in this godsforsaken land. Used up by Clover and his greed for power.
When they reached the top, Emory’s heart leapt and fell in a quick succession, and she was certain her legs would have given out from under her if she weren’t under Clover’s compulsion.
Because Romie was there. Romie and Aspen and Tol and a blond boy that could be none other than Orfeyi.
“Romie,” Emory managed weakly, feeling tears fall silently down her cheeks as she took in the four keys standing blank-faced in a circle in the middle of the fountain, as if awaiting their sacrifice without any ounce of defiance. They looked paralyzed, turned to stone, their eyes eerily unblinking. She would havethought they were dead if it weren’t for the faint, rhythmic movement of their chests as they breathed.
“What did you do to them?” Emory asked Clover, voice trembling with fury.
“Just keeping them docile until the sacrifice. Now that you’re here, we can begin.”
He snapped his fingers, and in unison the keys blinked, stirring even as they remained rooted in place.
Romie’s head snapped to Emory as if she were a magnet drawing her gaze to her. Her face looked stricken, her mouth falling open and her eyes going wide. “No,” she breathed. “Em, you can’t be here, he’s going to—”
“Silence,” Clover commanded. He shoved Emory forward so that she was close enough to touch Romie and the others, but still unable to act of her own free will due to the compulsion. “I believe what Romie was going to say,” Clover continued, “was that you, Emory, are very much needed for our ritual. You and the syrinx, that is, but I guess we’ll have to do without it now.” His gaze darkened. “What happened when you played it, back in the temple?”
“I—” Emory tried to fight against the compulsion, tried to lie, but couldn’t. “I saw the souls of the first Tidecallers. I made a bargain with them to summon Sidraeus and bind him to me.”
Clover’s lip curled in contempt. “So you beat me to the punch. No matter. Once you become Atheia’s vessel and your will is bound to mine, I’ll have you summon him to you and then kill you both to take the deities’ power.” He took a deep, steadying breath, his eyes closing in bliss. “Finally, after all these years, I’m so close to being able to finish what I started.”
All Emory could hear was,Once you become Atheia’s vessel…
She met Romie’s gaze. Her friend couldn’t speak, but the anger in her eyes told Emory everything she needed to know.
Romie had warned her to stay away, had tried to prevent all of this. And Emory hadn’t listened.
She’d played right into Clover’s hand and doomed everyone in the process. Romie and the keys would die. The pieces of Atheia they carried, her divine essence, would be put back together inside Emory, and she would become Atheia’s vessel—only to be bound to Clover to make him into a proper, evil god.
