Chapter 4 Baz #2
A soft sound made him whip around, thinking Wulfrid or one of his friends had regained consciousness.
But it wasn’t them. It was Clover, standing over the four of them with a mildly panicked look on his face, puzzling over why his ward had vanished.
Clover threw a glance over his shoulder, then quickly used his magic to make them invisible once more.
Damn it, Baz thought as Clover sidestepped the bodies.
Clover stopped with his foot in the air, tensing as if he’d heard something. As if he’d heard Baz. Clover’s gaze went to the fallen books. He bent to pick one up, and his eyes slowly traveled up, searching the empty space where Baz stood, invisible.
As if he knew Baz was there.
An edge of fear. Something darker honing to a sharp point. Because as Baz stood there, a foot from the man who had betrayed everything he believed in, who was a murderer and the source of all chaos to come, a wicked thought crossed his mind.
If Baz were a killer, he could end this here, now.
He already was a killer, wasn’t he? Had killed before, an accident, yes, but would it be so different now if he did so intentionally, if it was for the greater good?
“So you’re the one making all that noise.”
Kai’s voice tore Baz from his thoughts. His heart stopped, thinking he’d been discovered. But Kai didn’t see him. He inspected the fallen books Clover crouched over, then looked around for someone else. He raised a brow. “Having fun all on your lonesome?”
Clover slapped on one of his easy smiles. “Something like that.” He put the books back on their shelves and casually leaned against the frame. “Truth be told, I was waiting for someone.” He looked Kai over as if to say, Not who I was expecting, but you’ll do.
A hint of jealousy reared its head up in Baz before he saw the flat, uninterested look Kai gave Clover. “Party’s that way,” he said before rejoining past-Baz.
And just like that, the bodies were forgotten, an opportunity missed.
Despite being invisible, Baz couldn’t risk going into the ballroom after them. Too many dancing bodies to weave through undetected. But as he paced around the empty Decrescens library thinking of his next move, Thames came barging through the hidden door looking like he was going to be sick.
And that’s when Baz remembered the bloodstain on Thames’s jacket—and the doubts that would be creeping into Thames’s mind right about now.
He had seen this before through Thames’s own eyes, from the memory Polina had extracted from his dead body.
And this doubt, he might be able to use to his advantage. Get him to turn Clover in.
Baz started to follow Thames, but a sudden prickling sensation on the back of his neck made him stop dead. He turned, peering around the dark, empty library. He had the distinct impression someone was watching him.
When he turned back, Thames was gone.
Baz deflated. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Despite all his doubts, Thames was too enamored of Clover to turn his back on him. It was the great tragedy that would lead to his own death.
A string of more failures followed.
First Baz tried to keep his past self and Kai at the party after hours so that they could catch Clover and Thames in the act of killing Wulfrid and his friends, to no avail.
Next he sped time up to the night he and Kai had caught Clover emerging from the Vault—which also happened to be the night Clover and Thames brought the bodies up into the library to make it look like Wulfrid and his friends had been killed by the Vault’s vicious wards.
But he failed to alert past-Baz and Kai to Thames’s presence, and Clover seamlessly managed to divert their attention so they never saw him handling the bodies.
Before the authorities were alerted and the bodies moved, Baz decided to damn the risk and seek out Polina.
She was the first person his present self interacted with, pretending to be past-Baz, and he hoped she wouldn’t look too closely at the slightly longer length of his hair or the different clothes he wore.
If she noticed anything off with him, she didn’t say, and eagerly agreed to come with him to the library, where he convinced her to use her Enshriner magic on the corpses of the four students to extract their memories so Clover would be ousted.
But Polina came up blank. “It’s as if their memories have been wiped clean,” she said, frowning at the bodies. “Could the wards have done that?”
Baz grumbled a noncommittal response. He knew without a doubt that Clover had wiped the corpses’ memories using his magic. Covering all his tracks like the clever fox he was.
Everything Baz tried backfired. But he kept going. Had to.
Wondering if the changes he sought to enact were too direct, he shifted gears and tried leaving subtle clues instead.
And when neither Kai nor past-Baz picked up on any of them, and time kept ticking forward until it was the night they were to break through the wards and disappear behind the door in Dovermere, Baz resorted to blatant desperation.
He found Kai alone while past-Baz had gone to tell Cordie the truth about what they were doing. If Kai knew he was not his Baz—at least, not exactly—he did not show it. Kai only looked at him with an arched brow, dark eyes glinting with amusement.
“Back so soon?” Kai asked.
“I, uh…” Words escaped him. Because here he was actually talking to Kai again, and for a moment, he could pretend everything was right. He wanted to draw Kai close, pull him in for a kiss. Get lost in his eyes, his voice.
But all he saw in the back of his mind was the thread of Kai’s life, cleaved by a fate worse than death.
Whatever you do, don’t go through the door. The warning was stuck in his throat. Would Kai believe him, if he were to speak to him so bluntly?
“Brysden.” Kai’s brows were knit together. “What’s wrong?”
“I think you were right not to trust Clover,” Baz said, opting for the truth—as much as he felt he could divulge of it.
Kai immediately grew tense. “What did he do?”
“It’s what he’s going to do. What he said about Emory bringing about the destruction of the worlds… It’s not true. It’s Clover who will do that, not Emory.”
Kai studied him for a moment, expression unreadable. “Look, I know I gave Clover a hard time,” he said tersely, “and I know you’re dead set on thinking there’s no way Emory could do this, but you have to face the facts here.”
“What if we don’t have all the facts? What if Clover manipulated the facts to make himself look like the hero?”
“What about Luce, then? She had the same vision as Clover. I don’t see how both of them could be wrong about this.” He frowned at Baz. “What prompted this, anyway? You were team Clover a minute ago. What changed?”
I saw how it ends. “I just have a bad feeling.”
“About tonight?”
And what comes after.
“I know you’re nervous,” Kai continued. “You don’t have to be. But if you don’t want to do this, I’m with you. We’ll head to Harebell Cove, try to go through this time rift Luce spoke of. We’ll find another way. But Baz? I know you can do this.”
Baz wanted to cry. Lie, a voice in his head said. Tell him anything that will stop him from going through that door.
Tell him the truth.
It’s what Kai would do.
“Don’t freak out,” Baz said slowly, “but I’ve seen this all happen before. Because I’m… I’m from the future.”
Kai gave him an odd look. “Yeah, you and me both.”
“No, I mean, I’m not the same Baz who came here with you.
” He took a deep breath. “In a few minutes, Baz is—I am going to walk in here, and I’m going to tell you that Cordie’s coming with us tonight.
And then we’re all going to go unpick the Vault’s wards, and I need you to listen to me, because something really terrible is going to happen. ”
“You’re freaking me out here, Brysden.”
“I know, but—just listen, please.”
And Kai did. He listened without interrupting as Baz told him everything that would happen, how they would get separated by the Hourglass, how Baz would later find out everything Clover and Thames had done, the murders, the Tidecaller synth.
How Baz would pen their favorite book and be transported to the very center of the sleepscape, where he would meet the god of balance and learn of the grim fate that awaited Kai and Luce.
Kai was quiet for a while after, making Baz think maybe he’d broken his brain. Was there a rule the god forgot to tell him against divulging someone’s future?
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Baz said. “I know you probably don’t believe me, but—”
“I believe you.”
He met Kai’s eyes, so stark and bright with trust.
“You do?”
A muscle feathered in Kai’s jaw. “I swear, if that piece of shit Clover thinks he’s getting away with this…”
“Kai?”
Baz’s voice drifted toward them—past-Baz’s voice. He was back.
Panic seized present-Baz. He gripped Kai’s hands. “No matter what you do, promise me you won’t go through the door. Please, I can’t lose you.”
Before Kai could reply, before his own past self could see them together, Baz turned the dial on the pocket watch, the symbols on its surface coming alive to make him invisible.
Kai frowned at the space where he disappeared, then at Baz’s invisible hand as it squeezed Kai’s arm. His eyes fluttered shut.
“I promise,” Kai whispered.
For the first time, Baz thought there might actually be a chance to change both past and future—and save the boy he loved.