A person who’d become a shade. A Soultender robbed of a soul.
He wasn’t supposed to follow her back into the waking world.
She wasn’t sure how it happened. His wraithlike hands had wrapped around her throat, and then: the feeling of tumbling through stars, the cold of the cave and the hard rock beneath her and the sharp, acidic taste of fear in her mouth as the umbra emerged behind her. It shouldn’t have been possible—wasn’t a full moon—and a distant part of her wondered if she had unwittingly called on Romie’s Dreamer magic to take him out of the sleepscape.
But no… This was no mere illusion, and it did not dissolve to dust.
What once was Jordyn pulled on her now with the intent to destroy her. Her vision blurred. The sea would claim her at last, and this would have all been for nothing.
Emory, Emory.
There it was, the Beast calling her back to its depths and into death’s waiting arms.
She had cheated death, once, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember how.
Yes—life. She had walked hand in hand with it before. Its power had flowed through her veins, answered her call.
And didn’t all magics unlock at her touch?
Emory reached for the one that had always come to her the easiest, the magic that had shaped and saved her time and time again. It jolted through her like an electric current, lending strength enough to fight back against the umbra’s hold.
Heal, she thought, and it was so very eager to comply.
But she couldn’t heal away the water in her lungs, couldn’t create air she desperately needed, and there was no light to call upon here, no saving grace, no hope. Only this dread that filled every part of her. How had they managed to breathe underwater at the river? A distant part of her knew the answer, something about wards, magic she wasn’t skilled enough to call on, didn’t know how, because she was so damn mediocre.
Emory stopped fighting.
Let this nightmare drag me down where I belong, she thought.
But something else reached for her then, pulling her in the opposite direction. The tide, it seemed, wanted a piece of her too.
Except the tide had hands. A face. It yanked her out of the water, gifting her a second life. Or perhaps, more accurately, a third.
Emory fell back against the rock, fighting for every breath. Baz’s soaked figure bent over her. She clung to him desperately, not quite believing it was him, unable to grasp that she was still here, alive, with him at her side.
“I’ve got you,” he breathed. His shaking hands smoothed back wet hair from her face, eyes wild behind his skewed glasses. “I’ve got you.”
She wanted to break down in his arms, but the nightmare wasn’t over. The umbra emerged from the water again, towering over them. Tendrils of dark water wrapped around its elongated limbs as an angry shriek wrenched free of its throat. Cold frosted the frozen wave, and before either of them could move, the umbra lunged.
It wrapped its claws around Baz’s throat, as if in retribution for taking Emory away. Baz’s legs kicked wildly as the umbra lifted him from the ground, his hands searching for purchase, trying to escape the umbra’s hold.
Emory couldn’t see the invisible shadows that plagued him, but she felt it, the way the umbra feasted on Baz’s fears. She saw it in the tears that lined his eyes, and when his limbs stilled, the fight waning from him, Emory uttered a desperate cry.
She drew herself up, soaked and dripping and fearless as she opened her senses wide. She reached for whatever remnants of light she could grasp, reached for darkness and death and life and protection, for the illusion of hope and dreams and fears, anything to fend off the very real nightmare before her. The thing that was trying to devour Baz, snuff out his light and make him into a shade of what he was.
Emory wouldn’t let it. She couldn’t let the umbra destroy the boy in the field, the boy she’d looked up at the stars with, the boy who’d helped her time and again despite the crushing weight of a thousand fears.
He had saved her; she owed him the same kind of courage in return.
She screamed as magic rushed through her, blinding, searing. It tore at her, silver in her veins, blood that sang, a great crashing in her ears as it sought to burst forth.
Her power was a tidal wave unleashed. And though Emory knew it might be the end of her, she let it consume her.
32 BAZ
BAZ SUSPECTED EMORY’S POWER WAS close to slipping past that invisible line. Her skin rippled with strange light, like moonlight over water, her veins shining silver just beneath the surface, pulsing brighter and brighter. A star on the verge of implosion.
The Collapsing readying its fateful blow.
And even with the umbra’s claws around his throat and fear like he’d never known seeping through him, all Baz could think of was her. The pain of knowing she would become like his father, like Kai, her magic eclipsing everything she had once been. The girl who made dead things grow back, who made sunflowers bloom in an illusioned field, who made facing his fears a little more bearable than it had been before.
Baz tried to reach for his magic, this thing singing to him just past the cold, dreadful terror wresting for control. A beam of blinding light burst from Emory’s chest. It shot toward the monster holding Baz in its grasp, made it shriek, shrink back in pain. Fear dug its claws out from him, and Baz slumped onto the rock below, head spinning as silver flooded his vision.
Emory cried out in pain as another beam of light shot from her. There was a crack, a sound that ripped through the world as a piece of the cave ceiling came loose.
And suddenly, Baz was back in the printing press, with his father’s arms wrapped around him and machinery raining down on them as the blast of his Collapsing razed everything it touched.
His worst fear reenacted. His darkest memory replicated.
He couldn’t let this happen again. Not to her.
Baz pulled on all the threads around him.
The rock froze midair. The umbra stilled, stumbled back, disappeared into the motionless water. The silver light around Emory receded as Baz wound back the figurative clock that sent her Collapsing back to a time it had not yet happened. And this was so much bigger than the death magic she’d wielded on another new moon night, when he had stopped that, too. And he was so very far past that line between small magic and big magic, but still he trudged on deeper and deeper, watching as the silver in her veins dulled, then darkened to blues and reds and purples.
She was a dying star in reverse, until at last, there was just Emory. No longer shining with ethereal light, but shaking with the impossible weight of what was and then was not.
“You’re okay,” Baz rasped. “Everything’s all right.”
He had done that. He had stopped her Collapsing.
Emory sagged against him. “Thank you.”
Baz wrapped his arm around her, his cheek pressed against her wet hair, and realized he would do it all again in a heartbeat.
* * *
The sea heaved the two of them onto the beach, boneless and utterly spent.
They’d gone into the caves at the lowest point of the noonday tide and emerged just before it reached its peak. An entire afternoon had somehow passed in the blink of an eye, though it felt, peculiarly, like it had spanned a lifetime.
Baz’s ears still rang with the echo of monstrous shrieks and falling rock, and all he could see were Emory’s silver veins and that blast of power that almost tore the cliff down on them. He watched the rapid rise and fall of her chest now as she lay sprawled on her back with her head turned to the horizon. Her veins were a normal color under her skin.