“Emory,” says Travers. Water spills from his open mouth, black and oozing like blood. “Help us.”
Black narcissus blooms sprout from his ears and lips and skin like fungi on a cadaver, because that is what he is becoming, bone and shadow and lifeless eyes, death personified.
“This is your fault.”
Travers crumbles. Buds sprout from his corpse. They spread on the algae-slick rock and feed into the pools of salt water until nothing remains but a mound of narcissus in the deep.
Emory looks at her hands, where the ink of a new moon runs like blackened blood. A diamondlike narcissus appears in her palm, delicate, ethereal, damning. It slips from her fingers and shatters on the cave floor like glass as a monstrous screech echoes, out of place and out of time. A shiver runs up her spine. There is a wrongness to the shadows lengthening around her and those that claw at the inside of the hourglass, looking to shatter it from within.
The
glass
breaks
and black sand and wilted flowers that turn to ash and fearsome beasts forged in the Deep burst forth, a tidal wave of nightmares—
* * *
Emory woke with a gasp.
The clothes she’d fallen asleep in were damp from sweat. She didn’t remember dozing off, had merely lain here on top of her bed, staring at the ceiling as images of Travers plagued her. All summer she’d had these dreams of Dovermere, perhaps more memory than dream, fragments of reality trapped in amber, though nothing ever as clear or as chilling as this. Nothing that ever felt so real.
She looked at Romie’s empty bed, wishing she were here to make sense of it.
Your fault.
Emory sprang up and sat at her desk, retrieving the birth certificate she kept stashed in a drawer. It clearly stated the lunar phase she was born on—new moon—as well as the location of her birth, some small port town on the western coast of Trevel, where the Aldersea met the Trevelsea.
She was adamant there was no way she was Eclipse-born, but for good measure, she scribbled two hasty lines on a piece of paper:
Could Luce have lied about my birth? Weird magic—need answers.
She slipped the letter inside an envelope she addressed to her father. There was no other way to reach him in the remote area where he lived—the lighthouse at the edge of the world, he liked to call it—since the telephone lines that had become all the rage across Elegy and beyond had yet to make their way to the tiny hovel that was Harebell Cove. Emory affixed a sepia-toned postage stamp depicting a familiar coastline, her heart lurching at the image of smooth rocks lapped by frothy waves; all it was missing to be a perfect picture of home were the fields of harebells sighing toward the sea, her father’s white clapboard lighthouse standing firm against the wind.
Outside, the sky was graying with the approaching dawn, thick mist clinging to the school grounds. Emory changed, hopped on an old school-issued bicycle, and cycled down to the post office at the edge of town. She liked Cadence this way, cloaked in fog, quiet save for the peal of a bell down at the harbor and the answering call of seagulls. It reminded her of home.
She slipped her letter in the box attached to the front of the post office, a squat stone building with ivy-clad walls and a tattered shingle roof. She could only hope her father had the answers she sought.
The way Henry spoke of Luce had always enticed Emory as a child. Luce was a Dreamer who’d left her home to see the world, and to a girl growing up in the middle of nowhere, having a sailor for a mother was quite the romantic concept. Emory had dreamed of having both parents at her side, one half at sea and the other on land. How often she’d imagined her mother coming back for her. The two of them would sail toward the horizon together, and that lighthouse would always be there to guide them home.
Even as her childish wonder gave way to anger and resentment at being abandoned, Emory still found ways to romanticize the idea of her mother. Luce roamed the world unburdened by the concepts of home and duty, free to carve her own path wherever the currents led her. It was probably why Emory had been so drawn to Romie when she first met her at Threnody Prep, another Dreamer with wild notions who could never stand still for very long, always looking toward the next irresistible thing.
Romie herself had been quite taken by the idea of Emory’s mother.
“I want to be like her,” she’d stated.
At first the comment had baffled Emory. “Why?”
“Everyone I know, it’s like they’re here but not really living, you know? They’re stuck in their comfortable routines and boring old lives, and I want more than that. I want to sail away like your mom, go on a new adventure every day, meet new people, fall in love, try everything the world has to offer. Now, that’s living.”
Emory had told herself she’d wanted all that too, though in reality her ambitions were much more practical, starting with Get into Aldryn College so you don’t become a magical reject. It was easy to be swept up in Romie’s grand ideas, this hunger she had for more. But just like Luce, that drive only seemed to push Romie to keep secrets, leaving those she loved behind to put the pieces together in her absence.
There was the sound of a bicycle bell, and out of the mist a boy appeared, rushing past Emory as he threw a stack of newspapers at her feet.
The headline made her stomach turn.
BODY OF DECEASED ALDRYN STUDENT RESURFACES MONTHS AFTER DROWNING IN DOVERMERE CAVES.
A shiver licked up the back of her neck. She imagined Travers’s emaciated form emerging from the mist, nightmarish claws and elongated limbs reaching for her.
Your fault.
She hurried up the hill. Aldryn’s ghostly outline loomed at the top, barely discernable through the fog. Everything was still. Emory got off her bicycle and squeezed through the creaking gates. Her steps faltered. Someone knelt by the bicycle racks. She recognized Keiran’s chestnut head, the profile of his face. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up around his elbows, a jacket slung over his shoulder—the same clothes he’d been wearing last night. From the way he was doubled over, it looked like he might have kept the party going after the bonfires.
Good, Emory thought bitterly as she marched up to him. This way she could catch him unawares, finish what she’d started on the beach.
He must not have heard the soft rhythm of her bicycle’s wheels or her footsteps on the gravel. His hand hovered over a dark form at his feet. A crow, she saw, its wing bent at an odd angle. Like the limbs of those broken bodies on the beach.
Keiran’s fingers brushed the twitching bird’s wing, bluish black against his skin. Emory blinked incomprehensibly as the wing mended itself at his touch. The crow cawed, got to its feet, and flew away with a great flap of two perfect wings.
Keiran drew himself up just as the campus clock at the top of the stairs struck seven, a small, satisfied smile playing on his lips. He froze when he saw her. The impossibility of what he’d done filled the space between them, chilling her to the bone. Keiran wiped his hands on his slacks, affecting an air of nonchalance. “Morning, Ainsleif.”
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
Somewhere above them, a crow cawed.
“That. You healed its wing. You used New Moon magic.”
For a moment, she thought he’d deny it. But a sheepish grin lifted the corner of his mouth. “Ah.” He ran a hand through his already mussed-up hair. He looked so boyish, with that smile and those thick-lashed eyes, that sleepy look on his face. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”