Chapter 10 Kai
THE HOURGLASS WAS EXACTLY AS Kai remembered it.
As he and Baz entered the Belly of the Beast, the silence between them yawned open wider than the cavern itself. Kai could feel Baz’s anger and hurt simmering beneath the surface. He wished Baz would just let it out already, because anything would be better than this silent treatment.
Kai knew he’d brought it on himself. First by coming to Aldryn behind Baz’s back, then by trying to slip out of the Eclipse commons when he’d thought Baz was asleep—only to find him sitting in his favorite armchair in the dark, staring daggers at him.
“Tides, Brysden,” Kai had exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.” Baz had crossed his arms. “As if you thought I was going to let you go down there alone.”
Kai hadn’t even tried to convince him to stay behind. He might have used Baz’s injury to do so, but Baz had finally relented and used his time magic to reverse the damage Artem had inflicted on him.
If Kai ever got his hands on Artem, he would kill him for what he’d done.
In silence, they’d gone down the hidden stairs carved into the cliffside that led to the cove, and here they now were, not a word spoken since.
“Well, go on, then,” Baz quipped, breaking the quiet at last as he gestured to the Hourglass. “Work your magic.”
Kai bristled at the annoyance in his voice. “Look, I was just trying not to risk anyone else, all right?” he said, echoing Baz’s earlier accusation.
“Thanks for the consideration,” Baz muttered. His gaze flitted from Kai to the Hourglass. “What was the plan if you managed to open the door? You would have just gone through it without even saying goodbye?”
“Come on, Brysden.” The truth was, Kai hadn’t thought that far ahead. He eyed the Hourglass as if it were a formidable foe that kept thwarting him—and it was. “We both know it won’t actually open for me.”
Suddenly it seemed pointless to have come here at all.
After he’d found the epilogue in the sleepscape, after he’d read The Sleepers Among the Stars a million times trying to make sense of it, Kai had thought he and Romie must be the boy of nightmares and the girl of dreams that the text alluded to.
That being the forgotten parts of the puzzle meant they must have the ability to open the doors between worlds just as Emory did. That he, too, must be a key.
But as he again went through the motions of opening the door—the slice of a knife across his palm, an offering of blood against the striated rock—it became painfully evident that the Hourglass still would not open for him.
Kai swore and punched the Hourglass. He swore louder as pain lanced through his hand.
“Yeah, like that’s going to work,” Baz breathed.
“Shut up, Brysden.” Kai shook his hand, staring daggers at the Hourglass. “This is pointless. Why won’t it open for me if I’m supposed to be a fucking key?”
“Maybe you’re only half a key.”
It was the same thing Baz had said to him the first time Kai had tried opening the door, and of course he must be right.
Clover’s epilogue painted the girl of dreams and the boy of nightmares as going to the sea of ash together, so it made sense that the Hourglass wouldn’t open for Kai alone.
It likely never would without the other half of the equation. The dreams to his nightmares.
“Then maybe it’s time we find a Dreamer to test your theory out,” Kai spat.
“And what Dreamer is going to want to help a runaway Nightmare Weaver?”
Kai slid Baz an irritated look. Oh, he was enjoying this—sulking in the corner waiting to prove Kai wrong, seeing this ridiculous, risky plan fall apart.
Every line of Baz’s body spelled out told you so.
And he was right. No Dreamer would ever risk their life to help the likes of him.
The only one he could think of was gone. He was on his own.
But there was one other thing they hadn’t tried.
Kai looked at Baz, recalling the way he’d so easily pulled at the threads of time surrounding the door, when the Hourglass had nearly been torn down by falling debris.
Baz had reversed time so that the crack running down its middle would be fixed.
And if he’d been able to do that, who was to say he couldn’t also turn back time on the door’s lock, wind it back so that it unlocked as it had for Emory?
“You could do it,” Kai said quietly, fearing the words might be too big. “You’re strong enough to do it.”
Though neither of them had ever broached the subject, he knew Baz had thought of it. He seemed to consider it now, inching ever closer to the door, as if he too felt its odd, gravitational pull. But Baz pulled back, shaking his head.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t, or don’t want to?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you care more about protecting this damn door than helping me out. You don’t want me to open it. Not if it might prevent Emory and Romie from coming back.”
From the way Baz averted his gaze, it was clear Kai was right.
It was like Baz had taken it upon himself to become the guardian of the door.
A safeguard against those who might try to breach it, a sentinel awaiting Emory and Romie’s homecoming—if they were even still alive.
Baz didn’t want to try reversing time on the door for fear of slipping up, affecting the door’s power in a way that might mean Emory and Romie could never return.
“You won’t even consider trying, will you?”
Baz readjusted his glasses, palmed the back of his neck. He was nervous. “How is going through the Hourglass going to help you with your magic anyway? It might just make everything worse—both for you and them.”
Kai’s gaze slid to Baz’s neck. He could practically see the imprints his fingers had left there. Shame roiled in his stomach. What happened at the lighthouse was exactly why he needed to figure things out—why he’d come back to Aldryn at all. “I can’t keep hurting those around me.”
“And I can’t risk losing you,” Baz cried out. “Not again.”
The admission echoed in the silence. Something charged passed between them. It was the kind of rare moment where Kai dared to hope. Where he imagined Baz finally reaching for the bruised, broken heart laid out in offering before him.
But Baz looked away, fighting a flush creeping up his neck. As if the moment were too much for him. “We should get out of here. Get some sleep. Jae will be here first thing in the morning to come fetch you. They’ll make sure no one sees you heading back to the lighthouse.”
“You really want me to go?”
“I want you to be safe. And with the Quadri starting tomorrow, this place won’t be safe at all.”
Kai didn’t want to argue. He felt empty, hollow at the thought of leaving again. Of being at that lighthouse again, cut off from the world he knew and those he loved.
He’d managed to get a message across to his parents a few weeks back, letting them know he was safe.
But they couldn’t risk further contact; he didn’t want to lead the Regulators to them.
And anyway, it wasn’t his parents he missed.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t love them—he did—but he was used to spending time away from them.
Their business meant they hadn’t been a concrete part of his life for some time now, and he’d grown used to it.
Baz, on the other hand, had become a constant. A point of reference he could turn to, always. But as Baz walked away—from Kai, from the Hourglass—Kai felt for the first time like things might never be the same between them. Like maybe he’d messed it all up, and nothing could fix this.
He’d never been so scared to lose something in his life.
Kai did not wish to dream that night.
He knew what his own nightmares would show him. What Baz’s would too. And so he sought something different. The sort of nightmare that would hold no true fear for him, that could not hurt him, because it was not his or anyone else’s that he cared about.
He delayed sleep for as long as he could, sitting alone in the illusioned fields of Obscura Hall, with a night sky full of stars above him.
He didn’t dare fall asleep in the commons, where Baz would be susceptible to whatever horror he might conjure.
Where Kai’s hands might find themselves around his neck again, unable to tell where nightmare ended and reality began.
Sleep came inevitably. Kai drifted through darkness and stars, doing everything in his power to avoid the pull of Baz’s nightmares, the pull of Dovermere, the pull of his own fears.
He felt a different sort of pull then. The hollow void of a familiar type of nightmare. There was nothing to it but oppressive silence and bleak despair. An infinite, empty sort of darkness.
Kai knew instantly that he’d slipped into the slumber of an Eclipse-born who’d been branded with the Unhallowed Seal.
It was just as terrifying as he remembered, especially now that he knew exactly how it felt to have one’s magic snuffed out by the brand.
His own hollow dreaming when he’d been at the Institute had been unbearable.
Fury surged inside him, and he wanted nothing more than to tear the Unhallowed Seal off of this Eclipse-born’s hand, to rid them of this unspeakable burden and restore their magic to them. Magic was life, and to take it away in such a cruel way was as good as a death sentence.
But there was nothing he could do here. No way for him to help.
Kai should have welcomed the nothingness, found solace in the fact that nothing here could follow him back into waking. Instead, all he felt was more despair than he’d ever known.
He bit down on an angry sob.
All this power coursing through him, and the only thing it was good for was sowing more fear.
Kai left the nightmare with an acrid taste in his mouth. Despair and bitterness must have called to each other here in the sleepscape, for he immediately found himself in a nightmare that was brimming with both.
A woman in her midthirties, dark hair braided in a crown atop her head, sat hugging her knees amid a pile of bodies.
She was singing something Kai had heard before, a Trevelyan lullaby that mothers sang to their children despite the grim stories it told: young men lured out to sea in storms that drowned them, women who disappeared in thick coastline fogs, ships devoured by mythical sea creatures that spat out their bones on the other side of the world.
Indeed, this woman held a small child in her arms that Kai hadn’t seen at first, all bundled up in a blanket.
The woman rocked him gently. Tears ran down her cheeks.
Her singing was beautiful despite the breaking of her voice, the gruesome scene at her feet.
The woman set down the child atop the mound of corpses.
The young boy looked peaceful in his sleep; the lullaby had worked its magic.
The glint of a knife caught the light as the woman lifted it above the child.
Kai took an involuntary step forward just as she brought it down upon the boy.
Kai flinched and tripped over a corpse whose face was oddly familiar: a girl with red hair, her mouth set in a smirk even in death.
“I warned him it would not work.” The woman was staring at Kai through tears, her hands slick with the child’s blood. “The dead are meant to stay dead.”
The corpses around them sat up in one great movement. In sync, their lifeless eyes turned to Kai. He stumbled backward, suspecting who this was, what he was seeing. He needed to wake up. But something darker caught his eye.
Watching the scene was a towering umbra wearing an obsidian crown. It spoke in that same tongue as before, uttering the same words that Kai understood instinctively.
Open the door.
Suddenly the corpses moved at an unnatural speed, scrambling toward Kai. He screamed as he willed himself to leave this nightmare behind and wake the fuck up—
When he opened his eyes, Kai found he was no longer beneath the illusioned sky of Obscura Hall. He stood on the beach, waves lapping gently at his shins. In the pale moonlight, Dovermere’s mouth seemed to laugh at him in the near distance. That unnatural tongue resonated in his mind. Open the door.
But Kai turned his back on it, only to find that another sort of door had been opened, and out of it had crawled an army of revived corpses.