“Please,” Emory breathed.
Slowly, Kai drew himself up. He rounded on Emory, the umbrae at his back mirroring the gesture, shadows that seemed to bend to his command now. Baz tensed as he caught the gleam of silver in the Nightmare Weaver’s eyes, like the glint of a blade under the sun.
Kai fixated on the open doorway at Emory’s back. He took a step toward it, as if called by the velvety darkness beyond, but the umbrae’s claws gripped his shoulders, and Kai stilled, blinking away the silver fog in his eyes.
The Nightmare Weaver turned on the umbrae. “Sleep,” he said, and his voice was that of the lord of nightmares, quiet and commanding. The umbrae fell away to nothing but shadows, dissolving into the shallow water at his feet.
And then there were just the three of them in the stillness, staring at each other in the middle of the Beast. Three Eclipse-born standing before a door.
Even now, with the door to the Deep open and the vastness beyond within his reach, Baz heard no song, felt no pull, only the crushing disappointment of not being the chosen one like all the heroes in his stories.
He caught Emory’s eye then, and relief pulled a breath from his lungs.
She was still here.
For a terrible, gut-wrenching moment, he thought he’d never see her again.
There was so much he wanted to say to her, but the sea at their backs pushed on his magic, raging at time’s hold on it. And though the knowledge of his Collapsing made Baz less fearful than before, he knew there were still limits to his power, and the tide wouldn’t hold forever.
He pointed to Keiran’s unconscious form. “He meant to use you as a vessel,” he told Emory. “Your magic, your blood…”
“I know.” Her face was an obscure mask as she stared at Keiran. “You were right about him. He wanted to wake the Tides and have them eradicate all Eclipse-born.”
Like the Tides had intended when they sent the Shadow to the Deep.
Baz’s fingers went numb. There was not a sliver of doubt in his mind that Keiran’s motivations lay with his parents’ deaths. With what happened to them—what Baz did to them. He felt Kai’s gaze on him, as if the Nightmare Weaver sensed the tangled mess of feelings warring inside him.
“He really believes it, then?” Baz asked. “That the Tides are real and can bring lunar magic back to what it was?”
A grim nod from Emory.
“And you?”
Emory looked at the door. “I have to go through it, Baz. If Romie’s there, I have to bring her back.”
Understanding settled between them. She needed to answer the door’s call—find Romie, save her, bring her home.
And Baz couldn’t go with her. No one could, not if her Tidecaller blood alone was what might protect her in the Deep, the sea of ash, wherever this Tides-damned door led. Besides, he needed to stay here, hold back the tide, help these time-stilled students back to shore.
The idea of saying goodbye was unbearable. Emory had walked back into his life, carved herself a place in it despite all his trepidations, and though Baz doubted he would ever be fearless like Kai or Romie, he knew Emory had made him want to fear less. This girl who’d laughed in fields of gold, who’d made sunflowers bloom, who’d looked up at the stars with him and thought they were lost souls trying to find their way home.
Come back home, he wanted to say to her now. But the words felt painfully inadequate.
Emory’s gaze swept over the frozen students around the dais. “Make sure they get back to shore,” she pleaded. “They weren’t part of this. It was all Keiran. He used them—was willing to sacrifice them. And he… he killed Lizaveta.”
It was then that Baz noticed the redhead Emory was staring at. The knife lodged in her neck.
Emory rubbed at her bloodstained wrist, where Baz knew the silver spiral was inked on her skin. Her throat undulated as she swallowed some emotion back. “I’m sorry for dragging you into this, Baz. If I could take it back…”
“I wouldn’t. Not any of it.”
Despite everything they’d gone through, he wouldn’t change a thing, because it all brought her to him and him to her, brought both of them here, in this moment, standing in a cave dripping with time, before a door made of myth and story. And that felt a little like fate, Baz thought, even if it was a cruel one to pull them apart like this at the very end.
Emory’s mouth quirked up in a sad smile, and those might have been tears lining her storm-cloud eyes, but he couldn’t tell, not as she turned to Kai. “Romie said something to me in my dream. She said, ‘Tell Kai I left it for him to find.’？”
Kai and Emory looked at each other in silence, and that felt momentous too, in a way Baz couldn’t quite explain. Here were the heroes of this story, he thought. The girl whose blood was a key and the boy of nightmares and the other girl somewhere beyond the door who’d dreamed too much and reached too far.
Finally, Kai dipped his chin toward the door, the swirling darkness beyond it. With a slanted smile, he told Emory, “Remember not to veer from the path, dreamling.”
When Emory’s eyes met Baz’s again, they were full of fragile, expectant hope. Like she was waiting for him to come up with an alternative to this mad plan, or perhaps just for him to say goodbye.
The words wouldn’t come.
She nodded as if she understood, started to turn toward the door.
“Wait,” Baz said. Stay, he thought.
He knew that wasn’t a possibility, so Baz kept the word trapped between his lungs. His resolve stood, a fragile thing, but Emory’s seemed to crumble entirely. In a blur of motion, she reached for him, arms draping around his shoulders, tear-stained cheek a perfect fit in the crook of his neck.
“Thank you,” she murmured against his flushed skin.
Baz’s arms encircled her. He breathed her in, engraved the feel of her against him. He wanted to tell her that he’d been wrong, that everything she touched didn’t crumble to dust. Rather, she made the dust fall away, leaving things polished and new again in her wake. He thought she should know that but didn’t know how to say it. It was what she’d done for him, in a way. For so long he’d held on to this image he had of their youth, not realizing they could never go back to that. Not realizing he didn’t want to go back to that either. He’d learned too much, seen too much of the world, to return to such naivety. He’d finally shaken off some of his fears, and that was largely her doing. She’d pushed him to step outside the comforts of his limits, had shown him he could try at something and damn the risk.
Like that kiss.
He wouldn’t take it back, wouldn’t change any of it. He’d followed his gut, put himself out there, and for that brief, terrifying, exhilarating moment when she’d kissed him back, it had all been worth it. The world had felt right, his feelings vindicated. Proof that he wasn’t crazy thinking there might have been something between them. What happened after the kiss didn’t matter, not really, because at least he’d done something. For once, he hadn’t kept everything bottled up inside.
She’d made him feel free, like all the gulls they used to chase down to the sea. She’d made him realize he couldn’t fly with clipped wings, and only once he stopped letting his fears control him would he finally soar.