Emory took her shoes off once she reached the beach that stretched the length of town, white sand bordered by rippling tall grass. Idle chatter and carefree laughter pervaded the air, a dozen fires already crackling to life. She stuck to the shadows, trying to remain invisible, wary of the tide coming in. It was deceitfully beautiful, devouring the shore one gently cresting wave at a time. But the Aldersea remained quiet, no voice calling her name.
Still, the farther she walked, the more untamed the beach became, the sparser the fires and laughter. Emory braced for what awaited around the next bend. She thought briefly of turning back, finding the safety of her room, but the absence of Romie filled every empty corner of it with suffocating reproach.
She had to do this. For her.
Dovermere Cove greeted her like the revenant she was. Dark waves battered against the towering seaside cliffs, echoing the thundering in her chest. The cave mouth on the far side of the cove grinned at her wickedly.
There were more students here than Emory expected. Thrill-seekers who wanted to be close to Dovermere and its dark pull for whatever twisted reason. She saw a few of them passing around jars of moonbrew, a potent concoction meant to open one’s senses to the moon and tides to better honor the dead. But there was no solemn remembrance in the gesture; they seemed to do it only for show, getting drunk on it the way they would on any cheap bottle of wine.
It sparked anger in her, bitter defensiveness. Had they even known the students who drowned? Surely their grief couldn’t be more than an abstract thing, a pale shade of the monster clawing at her own insides. She wanted to grab those bottles from their hands, smash them on the sand, wipe away their careless smiles.
His eyes met hers over one of the fires, as if called by the violence in her mind.
A chill ran through her as Keiran Dunhall Thornby stared at her for the second time that day. Flames danced golden on his skin and gilded his carefully styled-back hair, a few chestnut locks of which fell across his forehead. He was the picture of ease and nonchalance, sprawled as he was on the sand and leaning back against an impressive piece of driftwood. His pants were rolled up past his ankles, bare feet resting near the fire. A stark contrast to the last time she’d seen him here.
Beside him was a boy with umber skin, his throat bared to the moonless sky as he roared with laughter, and a girl with chin-length hair the color of flames, her painted lips curled up in amusement as she brought a bottle of sparkling wine to her mouth. Emory knew of them: Virgil Dade and Lizaveta Orlov. Along with Keiran, they were considered Aldryn’s elite, upperclassmen who had money and power written all over them, from the clothes on their backs to the way they held themselves. A certain aura hung over the three of them, as if they stood a world apart from the rest of the students gathered on the beach.
Virgil nudged Lizaveta as he noticed Emory watching them. Recognition shone on both their faces. Other people on the beach were staring at her now too. Look, it’s the girl who survived the Beast, someone said. What in the Deep is she doing back here?
Because that was all she was to them: a nameless curiosity, just the girl who’d made it out alive and was silly enough to come back.
She knew what Romie would have done in her place. She’d have spun this in her favor, held her head high and refused to be made a victim everyone tiptoed around and gossiped about. She would have walked right up to Keiran and his friends with that bold confidence of hers, said some witty comment or another, and everyone would have laughed and moved on.
Emory wasn’t Romie—something she’d been painfully aware of all her life—but she would need to be to get the answers she sought.
Keiran’s voice reached her before her forced bravado could slip. “Care to join us, Ainsleif?”
Her stomach tied itself into knots at the sound of her last name on his lips. It felt both strangely personal and othering. Keiran was smiling at her with a lazy tilt of his mouth, as if the waterlogged corpses strewn on the banks of this very cove were a distant, forgotten memory.
Emory couldn’t forget. The images were starkly imprinted on her mind: the loud clattering of her teeth, the echo of it running through her bones, the cold and the dread and the numbness in her soul. The odd way Serena Velan’s and Dania Azula’s limbs had been bent on the sand, Daphné Dioré’s unseeing eyes, and the bluish tint of Harlow Kerr’s lips. The spiral etched just below the palm of their upturned hands, the strange mark no longer a faint gleaming silver like her own but black—the lines of it smudging together like too much ink bleeding on paper.
She tried to push it all down. To breathe so she could get on with what she came here to do. She forced a bashful smile, kicking at the sand. “That’s okay. I don’t want to intrude.”
“Nonsense, you must join us,” Virgil said, earning a disbelieving stare from Lizaveta. He snatched the bottle from her hand. “Plenty of this to go around, and we’d love the company, truly. Isn’t that right, Lizaveta?”
They exchanged a loaded look until Lizaveta turned to Emory with a tight-lipped smile. “If the boys insist.”
“The more the merrier.” Virgil grinned.
Keiran watched Emory with a feigned nonchalance that crawled under her skin. Like he was testing her, waiting to see if she’d be dumb enough to say something about that night—about the mark they both had—in front of his friends.
Two could play this game, Emory thought. And if she had to drink and exchange pleasantries to get her answers, so be it.
She sat next to him on the sand, wiping her clammy hands on her corduroy pants. The bottle was passed around until her fingers curled around the neck of it, brushing Keiran’s as they did. His Full Moon tattoo reflected the firelight, a silvery disk with a stalk of white orchids curved around it, the opposite of the dark sigil on her own hand. Emory felt his eyes on her as she took a sip, acutely aware of the quiet intensity in them.
“I’m surprised to see you out here,” Keiran said conversationally. The words After what happened last spring hung unspoken in the air.
“I’m not,” Virgil chirped with a lopsided grin, giving Emory an appreciative once-over. “There’s a certain undeniably attractive quality to death and tragedy.” He swept a hand to the students on the beach, a few of which were still glancing at Emory. “We simply can’t keep away from it.”
Lizaveta rolled her eyes. “I think that’s just the Reaper in you talking, Virgil.”
Emory peered at the back of Virgil’s hand, where the sigil of House Waning Moon shone, a thin crescent curved around a deep purple poppy. Those who specialized in death magic had the most closely regulated tidal alignment outside of House Eclipse. But despite the grim nature of their power, it was far better regarded than any Eclipse magic ever was. Death, after all, was part of the holy cycle of life, something to be respected, revered—whereas Eclipse magics were deemed unnatural, something born beyond the perpetual cycle of the moon and tides.
Emory knew Reaper magic was rarely ever about death itself, but rather bringing an end to things. She supposed there was a certain beauty in that. Still, she couldn’t help the gooseflesh rising on her arms as Virgil’s dark eyes met hers from across the fire, and he said, “She’s a Healer. She gets it, this pull death has on us. I bet it’s why you came here, isn’t it?”