“Lo and behold, the Healer has arrived.”
Did she imagine the slight edge to his tone as he said Healer?
Everyone looked up at her. A startled Nisha, dressed in a low-cut suit of crushed mauve velvet, swept something silvery out of sight with a low swear. Keiran pushed off the wall, the slight narrowing of his eyes the only sign of his surprise. Lizaveta’s ice-chip eyes bored into her as she snatched back her arm from whatever Nisha had been doing. She wore a green satin gown that clung to her in all the right ways, accentuating her auburn hair.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in that haughty voice of hers.
Emory forced lightness in her tone, a smile on her lips. “Keiran invited me to the lighthouse. I’m sorry I’m a little early, though. I guess we all had the same idea to come here before the main event, huh?”
Lizaveta’s icy gaze swept from her to Keiran. “What is she talking about?”
“Did he not tell you?” Emory asked, feigning innocence. “I’m sorry. I thought you would have…”
Keiran cut across to Emory, face guarded. “I told you to meet me at ten.”
She eyed the expensive-looking bottle in Virgil’s hand. “Looks to me like the party’s already started.”
Virgil handed her the bottle with a mischievous smile. “Darling, the party never stops when I’m around.”
Emory took a long sip, willing the bubbles to ease her into this role she’d have to play. Her eyes never left Keiran’s. Was that fear she saw in them? Annoyance? She felt no small amount of satisfaction at that, certain she’d unwittingly wrested the upper hand from him by showing up here just now.
“Well? Are you going to tell us why you invited her?” Lizaveta asked Keiran, arms crossed in displeasure.
Before he could answer, Emory held her wrist up. “It seems I’m going to be part of the Selenic Order too.”
There was a tense silence as they took in her spiral mark, the implication of her words. Virgil gently pried the bottle from her grasp, muttering something about not being drunk enough for this.
Emory met Keiran’s gaze squarely. She had to wonder why he hadn’t told them about her. She didn’t trust him, wouldn’t let herself be played by him. And she was so very tired of being kept in the dark.
Secret society, cult, it didn’t matter. Either way, she would do her damned best to infiltrate the Selenic Order—and find a way to stop them from ever holding another one of their initiations at Dovermere. She would have justice for Romie and Travers and all the others.
No more senseless deaths. It ended here.
Baz thinking she was so quick to move on from Romie’s death had set her aflame. She felt like one of those stars racing across the sky. She wouldn’t stop now even if she was doomed to burn out entirely by the end.
12 BAZ
THOUGHTS OF THE GREENHOUSE—OF Emory’s unguardedness, the way the moonlight had limned her face as they watched the stars—warred with the bitter sting of everything that followed.
She had that Tides-damned mark just like Travers and the Guardian at the Gate and probably Romie, too.
Baz knew she had to be lying to him, had to know something she didn’t want him finding out. And yet… she was right about this, at least: Romie had been hiding things from both of them, it seemed. He knew firsthand how different his sister had been acting during those months leading up to her death. Standoffish and scattered. Secretive about everything and everyone she was suddenly spending time with, like Keiran Dunhall Thornby—whom Emory was now apparently hanging around with too.
Baz caught a glimpse of them in the adjacent building as he left the ramshackle greenhouse. Emory had her head ducked to hide a smile as Virgil Dade whispered something in her ear. There were others there too: Lizaveta Orlov, Nisha Zenara—whom he recognized now as the clerk who’d manned the desk in the Vault—and Keiran. The same group, no doubt, that Romie had fallen in with before her death.
Baz walked away before he could make sense of the tightness in his chest.
Music and laughter and conversation flitted over to him from all around campus, and his heart ached at the lightness of the sounds, the ease and camaraderie that felt so foreign to him. He had never truly realized how disconnected he was until now, in this very moment, when he understood that everyone had a life outside of the classroom, events like the meteor shower they were excited about and people to make plans with, to share things with. They were part of something. A mainland of activity and connection bound by a desire to belong, to experience, to live in all the messy senses of the word.
He was an island that stood wholly apart.
Kai had been there with him for a time, but even then, it’d been as if they both stood on opposite ends, an invisible line drawn between them that they dared not cross, or perhaps didn’t know how.
It was a predicament of his own making, really. Baz had crafted this perfect bubble of solitude, a narrow existence that could be contained between the shelves of the library, the tapestried walls of the Eclipse commons, the pages of a story. For as long as he could remember, he’d only ever needed his books and studies for company, but suddenly the idea of returning to the empty common room felt unbearably lonely.
He paused by the Fountain of Fate. From his pocket he pulled both Romie’s note and the napkin from the tearoom with the address for the Veiled Atlas. Maybe Selandyn and Jae were right about accepting Romie’s death, that he was looking for meaning where there was none. But he knew if the roles were reversed, Romie would have hunted down answers to the ends of the earth—probably had done exactly that, driven to Dovermere by this strange idea that, like a mad dream, would not let her go.
Romie, Kai, even Emory—they were people who acted without fear, and Baz envied their fearlessness. Maybe he could try to be like them.
He cut across the lawn, turning his back on Obscura Hall and the hollowness carved within. For one night, he would do something, and damn the consequences.
* * *
The Veiled Atlas was a private taproom in the poshest part of Cadence. The lighting was brassy, the furnishings dark and moody, and if it weren’t for all the Song of the Drowned Gods–themed baubles and antiques strewn around—a life-size statue of a winged horse, a solid gold heart run through with an equally golden sword, sepia-toned portraits of Cornus Clover smiling attractively in every one, a rusting typewriter said to have belonged to him, and so many framed paintings on the wall that it was a wonder it didn’t collapse—Baz would have felt entirely out of place.
A long claw-footed table sat in the middle of the room he’d been brought to, finely set with silver cutlery and crystal glasses and the remnants of a feast. At the head of the table was an elegant middle-aged woman swathed in gossamer fabrics and pearls, her white-blond hair falling in perfect curls down to her middle.
“I wasn’t aware Jae was back in town,” Alya Kazan said tightly, her wine-red lips downturned in a sour expression.
“I think they’re just passing through.”
A scoff from Alya. “Figures. Always so swift to move on to bigger and brighter things.”
Baz palmed the back of his neck. When he’d mentioned Jae’s name at the door, Alya had laughed and nearly shut the door in his face. “If Jae thinks I’ll do them any favors after they left without so much as a goodbye last time…”