Baz’s face stark in his mind.Promise me you’ll remember…
“I promise,” Kai managed to grit out, unsure which voice he was replying to. It didn’t matter. He was dead anyway.
But then—a tidal wave of darkness. Not death, but the umbrae, charging over to them like soldiers on a battlefield. They passed right through Kai and Luce and swarmed around Clover. Whatever power he’d wrapped around Kai and Luce loosened, enough for Kai to gasp for air, to catch his bearings. His hand shot out to Luce. Together they ran from Clover as hescreamed, as the umbrae kept swarming and swarming until he was buried beneath a heap of nightmares.
Kai and Luce did not stop running. There was no knowingwhich door they were running toward. Back to the Wychwood or onward to the Wastes. It didn’t matter; all that mattered was getting away from Clover while they had the chance.
Free me,that voice boomed in Kai’s mind.Promise you will pull me from this nightmare and into the realms of the living.
Kai could see a door in the dark, glistening gold. They were so close….
Silver light erupted at their backs, drowning out the sleepscape like a negative photograph showing stars as dark spots in an ocean of white. Kai knew it was Clover’s power blasting away the umbrae, because of course the bastard would survive this place, a god in the making whom nightmares could not stop.
Kai had only a second to pull Luce into the shield of his arms before the blast hit them. The force of it shoved them forward in a rush of searing light and screeching umbrae desperate to evade it, and there was nothing they could do as this riptide of power swept them over the edge of the path of stars.
They were falling.
No one was ever meant to veer from the path. It was like diving at too great a depth under the sea, where everything became a crushing weight, a space no one could exist in. It was an abyss, empty and unknowable.
It was death.
Kai wanted to rage at the cruel irony of it all. He, a Nightmare Weaver. Luce, a Dreamer. Both were well-versed in the ways of the sleepscape. Both had survived so much of its strange horrors, and this, despite constantly pushing the boundaries of what was safe here, venturing further than any other adept of the sleepscape, save perhaps Romie.
All for it to end in this final daring moment.
Anger and Luce was all Kai had to hold on to as they plummetedto their deaths. An endless sort of fall, the space around them becoming more and more oppressive the further they fell. Their hearts would likely give out before the end. Or maybe this was to be their hell: an eternal fall, a constant state of powerless fear.
But then… Kai’s feet struck something solid. The breath was knocked right out of him as he and Luce came tumbling in a heap on the floor—because those werefloorboardsbeneath them, the wood splintered with age, its dark polish flaking from scuff marks and years of use.
Kai felt his stomach plummet as the floorlifted, swooping upward in the dark. It was like being in the Obscura Hall elevator, though the stomach-dropping feeling was ten times worse here with the oppressive weight of the world around him. And now the floor wastilting, and Kai found himself sliding down the near vertical slant, Luce screaming at his side as she was flung down. He grabbed on to something—a post of some kind—and snatched Luce’s hand with his free one. She held on to him for dear life as they climbed up through the dark at impossible speed. Kai shut his eyes to fight off the vertigo.
And then his ears suddenly popped as the floor righted itself and the world became less oppressive. Still oddly weighted, but manageable; he didn’t feel like his limbs were being crushed, like his skull was about to cave in and his eyes pop out of their sockets.
Kai met Luce’s equally perplexed and relieved gaze. “Kai.” She jerked her chin up, eyes going wide. “Look.”
The post Kai had been holding on to—it was a mast. A great billowing sail, dark and moving like liquid silk, was attached to it.
They were on a ship. Sailing through the dark between stars, for thosewerestars around them. Yet they seemed distant, sparse. Not like the multitude of them that made up the path between worlds.
Kai and Luce helped each other to their feet. They were unsteadyon the moving ship, but at least it didn’t seem like it was going to topple over again anytime soon, its sail calm and steady. They came to stand at the side of the ship, peering at the dark.
“What is this?” Luce murmured.
But they both knew. The breezeless dark, the strange, distant stars… They were sailing through the space beyond the path. Just like the girl of dreams and the boy of nightmares from the epilogue.
This ship, whatever it was, had saved them from plummeting to their deaths. Or maybe thiswasdeath. A vessel carrying them to the afterlife, if there was one at all.
“Praise the Deep, am I ever glad to see you.”
The voice crept along Kai’s bones, lifted the hairs off the back of his neck. Slowly, he turned to its owner and knew then that surely he and Lucemustbe dead, because the face that smiled at him with such pained sorrow was that of a ghost.
And it was not one he was pleased to see at the end of all things.
“What the fuck is this?” Kai breathed roughly. “Why areyouhere?”
If he took offense to Kai’s brusqueness, the boy did not show it. “The gods of the living have been waiting for you two,” said Farran Caine. “And I’m here to bring you to them.”
PART IITHE GODS OF THE LIVING
