But here was Travers. Whole. Alive—though perhaps not for much longer if she didn’t do something.
In his seizing, his eyes met hers again, and she could plainly read the accusation there.
Your fault.
She caught sight of the inside of his wrist, where the spiral on his skin had begun to bleed black. As if death were readying its final blow.
Someone pushed past her and knelt beside Travers. Another Healer, an upperclassman she recognized as a teacher’s assistant in one of her classes.
“Emory,” Keiran snapped. “Help him.”
His voice pushed her to action. She moved past the fear and dropped to her knees across from the other Healer. Louis, she thought his name was. He looked bleary-eyed, unsteady, his labored breathing smelling of alcohol. If he was inebriated past the point of having any sort of grasp on his magic…
Heaving a shaky sigh, Emory laid a hand on Travers’s chest and tugged on her magic. It answered willingly under the new moon sky, the pressure in her veins instantly lessening.
She felt the magic start to work. Travers’s convulsions slowed, then came to a stop. Someone behind her breathed a sigh of relief, thanking the Tides. But now his skin was horridly pallid. Gone was the rosy flush that had been there before. Gone, too, was the light in his eyes; they were milky white, the skin around them all shriveled up. His cheeks were caving in, the skin on his face growing sallow and tight, as if he were aging faster than he should be, deteriorating before their very eyes.
“What the fuck is happening to him?” someone cried out.
Louis pulled away from Travers with a defeated look. “I don’t think my magic’s helping,” he mumbled before doubling over and retching on the sand.
Keiran caught her eye. “Have you got this on your own?”
“I… I don’t know,” Emory admitted, on the verge of tears. “I don’t understand what’s happening to him.”
“Liza,” Keiran called, producing a switchblade he shoved in the redhead’s hand. “Help her.”
Emory watched incomprehensibly as Lizaveta slashed her palm before dunking her hand into the sea, head tilted back, lips moving in what looked like a silent prayer to the night sky. It dawned on Emory that she was bloodletting to call upon her dormant waxing moon magic—though how it might help heal Travers was beyond her.
She frowned as Lizaveta came to stand beside her and rested her wet, bloodied hand on her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
Lizaveta’s ice-chip eyes were steady and sure. “Don’t fight it.”
It was like the doors to Emory’s magic were thrown wide open, and everything around her became too sharp. The pressure in her veins inexplicably returned, so intense she bit back a sob. She could practically taste the magic in the air, the surge of power that trickled down to her fingertips at Lizaveta’s touch.
An Amplifier’s touch.
“Try healing him now,” Lizaveta urged. “Hurry.”
Emory turned back to Travers, but it wasn’t really Travers anymore. It was a hulking shell of a person withering before her, emaciated skin stretched too thin over bones. She could almost see his heart through his rib cage, beating fainter by the second.
Emory couldn’t let him die.
The power in her veins was all too eager to answer Lizaveta’s touch. Her amplified healing magic surged into Travers’s body, but it still wasn’t enough, still didn’t slow down the deterioration.
“It’s not working,” she cried.
She needed more. Without warning, Lizaveta flung everything she had into Emory, fingers digging painfully into her shoulder. Where before, her amplifying magic had been a mere trickle of power, it became a riptide, pulling Emory under. She buckled under the weight of it, fighting for control as hollow echoes of mediocre rang in her mind. Her magic plunged to depths unknown, and as she reached the bottom of her well of power, something twisted and wrong rose to greet her, the very same something she’d felt all summer. The magic in her blood ebbed and flowed, answering a tide she couldn’t see, didn’t know. With it, that pressure in her veins mounted until it hurt, and she wanted to scream. It was as if Lizaveta’s amplifying magic had thrown open a floodgate she’d been trying desperately to hold shut until now.
She gasped as power not entirely her own flooded her—as she unwittingly unleashed it.
Tendrils of light slithered from the palm of her hand, still resting atop Travers’s frail chest. Ribbons of darkness weaved through the light to wrap around his body, where the algae and weeds and barnacles that clung to his clothes began to pulse, coming alive at whatever strange magic she wielded. Emory could do nothing to stop it, only gape at the impossibility of what poured out of her. It was the light of the full moon and darkness of the new moon and growth of the waxing crescent, none of which were her own, none of which were possible.
She was a Healer of House New Moon—but these were other magics coursing through her veins, as if she were siphoning them off those around her. Lightkeeper, Darkbearer, Sower…
Reaper.
Emory tried to pull away, to sever the connection to all these magics that were not hers, alignments she should have never been able to use, to this one in particular that she did not want, could not possibly wield. But the Reaper magic rushed through her as if it were her own, the antithesis to the healing magic she’d always known.
It was the lush darkness of a waning moon sky, the quiet of sleep, the peace of eternal rest.
She was powerless to stop the death magic that blasted from her hands, looking to silence the heart beneath them.
4 BAZ
THE ECLIPSE COMMONS WERE ALDRYN’S best-kept secret.
Every year, it seemed there was a new rumor surrounding them. During Baz’s freshman year, students believed they were located in an old dungeon deep below the school, and at some point, the tale running rampant had Eclipse students living in the damp caves of Dovermere, in the Belly of the Beast itself.
They’d at least gotten one thing right: Obscura Hall was indeed built below the school, and the only way to reach it was by riding the singular elevator down to the very bottom, a thing so old and rickety it was a marvel it still worked at all. Hazing rituals always had a couple first-years heading down to try to crack the mysteries of Obscura Hall, but once the elevator gates opened at the bottom, the wards would always kick in, manifesting as some barrier or other: a brick wall, an impenetrable tangle of thorny vines, a bottomless precipice.
And because no student outside of House Eclipse knew what lay beyond those wards, naturally, everyone imagined the worst. Whatever the whispers, they always seemed to paint it as a cold, wicked place to match the wicked souls within.
The reality was much sunnier. Fading wallpaper with dainty sunflower motifs and old patterned carpets over pale wooden floors. Well-loved chairs and sofas in shades of burgundy and rust and what must have once been gold. The smell of coffee and brine and the warmth of amber light as it poured from the open window, the sound of crashing waves and screeching gulls a near-constant melody in the backdrop.
Sure, the furniture was rickety and the armchairs were sunken and the gauzy curtains that blew in the breeze were horribly moth-eaten, but that was all part of the charm, Baz thought. The place held history. Old trinkets from students past lay in every nook and cranny. Initials were carved on the walls, with no one to remember them by. Books whose owners were long dead were crammed in the tiny bookshelf by the fireplace, one large tome away from toppling over.