Chapter 22 Emory #2
Keiran grabbed her hand, and she watched in horror as the tips of his fingers elongated in shadowy claws, just like the umbrae.
He sliced one across her palm, drawing blood, then shoved her forward so that she stood before the basalt columns, where the fungi and moss still formed a lock around the silver spiral and Aspen’s rib.
His voice slithered in her ear. “Open it.”
Emory suddenly understood why the door hadn’t opened before—what it needed now.
Aspen’s bone to act as sacrifice. And Emory’s own blood to unlock it—just as the four lunar houses had sacrificed their blood in Dovermere before she’d unlocked the Hourglass.
She remembered Baz telling her that eclipses were the perfect alignment of moon, sun, and earth.
And if eclipses were what aligned all their worlds, made it possible to open the doors between them…
her blood held all the power of that rare Tidecaller eclipse.
It was a key in all the ways the door required it to be.
Given no other choice, Emory pressed her bloodied hand against it.
And the door unlocked.
Before her eyes, the columns rearranged themselves into an archway, through which she could glimpse the velvety, starry expanse of the sleepscape.
She twisted around to look at Keiran, at Romie, who was still being feasted on by the umbrae, at Aspen, who lay prone on the cave floor, alive but barely conscious.
Power still thrummed in Emory’s veins, but she was grasping at straws trying to think of a way out of this.
“What are you?” she asked, staring at Keiran-not-Keiran, hoping to distract him from the magic she was reaching for—the light from the stars behind her, all the bright possibility of the sleepscape, hoping to use it to unmake the umbrae and whatever creature stood before her in Keiran’s skin, the same way she’d done last time in the sleepscape.
His dark eyes flashed silver and gold. Shadows swarmed around him, as if in echo of her own gathering power. He opened his mouth to answer—and Emory unleashed herself.
The umbrae that held Romie erupted in brilliant silver light.
Emory herself shone with it, veins rippling silver along her entire body.
With the ley line coursing through her, she directed the power to Keiran, willing whatever dark force was behind his eyes to disappear as the umbrae had, but he was not so easily defeated.
His gaze turned vicious. Emory amplified the blast, letting out a frustrated scream as Keiran remained impervious to her power, as darkness began to press in around her, her ghosts whispering in her ears again, goading her on, desperate for more more more.
“Stop this,” Keiran said, seething.
But there was no stopping now. Her power tore through umbrae and rock and earth alike, until a grand trembling nearly shook her off her feet and part of the ceiling came undone, falling mere inches from her.
She caught a glimpse of Romie’s face—that deathly pallor returned despite the umbrae no longer there to feast on her—and wondered, with abrupt clarity, if this was her doing.
Suddenly Keiran grabbed her by the throat, as his ghost had in her dream, eyes aflame with something vicious.
All the fight left her at his touch, her magic fluttering out like a candle, until all that was left was the darkness, the ghosts, the guilt.
And Keiran’s fingers tightening around her neck.
He was going to kill her.
A perverse part of Emory wanted to see what he might do to her—wanted to see him take revenge on her, punish her for having left him to be devoured by the umbrae.
“Do your worst,” she said, feeling herself go limp in his grip. “It’s what I deserve.”
Her words made his features harden.
She might have imagined the darkness around her lessening, the whispers fading, the ghosts ebbing away from her in one swift motion as they drew into him instead.
Before she could make sense of it, the sound of her name pierced through the groaning of the cave.
Emory thought it might be the dream song spilling from the open door, calling her to the next world as it had brought her to this one.
But no—it came from the opposite direction.
And it was not a song at all but a voice.
Keiran’s grip on her eased as he spun around to see the newcomer kneeling at the edge of one of the steaming pools, one hand dripping blood into the water and vines shooting from the other.
Nisha was here.
Nisha was here, and it was so impossible that Emory could only stare as the Sower commanded vines to knock Keiran against the wall and wrap around his arms and torso, binding him so he could not move.
Virgil appeared at Nisha’s side, along with another vaguely familiar girl, the three of them bruised and battered but alive, and real, and here.
“Nisha?”
This came from Romie, who had managed to pull herself up onto her elbows, face still blanched, but alive.
Her look of absolute bewilderment would have been laughable in any other situation, but as Keiran fought against his bindings and the cave kept raining debris down on them, there was a sense of urgency that left no time for contemplating the hows and whys of their old friends being here.
“Those bindings won’t hold forever.” Nisha’s face was strained as she fought to keep her hold on Keiran.
“Quick, through the door!” Virgil yelled, pulling a dazed Emory along with him as he ran toward the portal.
Emory snapped out of it at last. The vaguely familiar girl—Vera, Emory recalled—helped Romie up and went through the portal with her. Emory and Virgil gathered Aspen between them. Nisha didn’t budge from where she still knelt by the pool, her concentration set on Keiran.
From the sweat beading down Nisha’s forehead, the weakening vines, Emory could tell the magic was taking a toll on the Sower, fatigue already kicking in.
“Go,” Emory said as she took control of the vines, wove her own magic through them to reinforce the bindings with ropes of light and chains of darkness. “I’ve got it, Nisha, go!”
Nisha didn’t need to be told twice. She took Emory’s place carrying Aspen, and went through the door with Virgil. As soon as they were through, Emory let go of the magic and flung herself with all that she had into the bleeding darkness.
The last image she had was of Keiran’s eyes flashing that unnatural silver and gold.
The sensation of falling among stars. A rush of fear. And then her feet struck solid ground and she found herself back in the space between worlds, on a familiar starlit path.
Emory whirled toward the rift she knew would still be open behind her, willing the door to close, to lock, before that monster followed them.
But as the rift closed—becoming once again a marble door with roots climbing up its smooth surface, exactly like the door Emory and Romie had opened into the Wychwood—she realized the monster was already here.
Keiran moved with a speed that wasn’t human, rushing past Emory with a snarl to chase after the others already barreling down the star-lined path.
Emory’s magic crackled beneath her skin, eager to be let loose in this realm of endless possibility.
She unleashed a blast of silver light toward Keiran.
He whirled on her with a surprised look of pain.
She blasted him again, making him move farther and farther away from her friends—and closer to the edge of the starlit path.
“Stop,” he said angrily. Shadows gathered around him, and Emory saw claws begin to form in them, the umbrae come to help their master.
With a sudden thought, Emory plucked a star from the darkness above her the way Romie had done last time.
She barreled into Keiran, pressing the burning star against his heart.
He screamed out in pain. She closed her own heart off against it, despite the sound being more human than before, more like Keiran than before, and pushed the star harder against him until he fell to his knees with a grunt, trembling in pain.
Emory dropped the star at her feet, distantly realizing it hadn’t burned her hand in the slightest, and ran.
She picked up on that Tides-damned song, the same one she and Romie had followed into the Wychwood, guiding them down the path. She caught up to the others just as Vera exclaimed, “It’s here!”
The third world’s door was solid gold.
It was a resplendent thing, a work of art. A border of sculpted gold depicting the wings of a great beast and, in its middle, a carved sunburst.
Emory pushed the door open, and just like last time, water spilled over the lip of the threshold. Glaring light had them all shielding their eyes as the third world Clover had written of opened wide to them.
This time when she went through the door, Emory was prepared, steeling herself against whatever waited on the other side. There was a feeling of falling, a heart-stopping moment where she thought she would break against the red-hued earth that appeared beneath her.
Emory landed with a painful thud on her back at the edge of what looked like a small spring.
It was all she allowed herself to see before she spun around to catch a glimpse of the still-open door, a rift of dark stars open beneath a sandstone arch through which the spring ran.
She hurried to shut the door with her magic and trap Keiran in the seams between worlds—but he slipped through the archway seconds before it closed, landing solidly on his feet as if he’d been doing this for centuries.
They stared at each other for a second that seemed frozen in time, his eyes more golden than black here, as if they had gobbled up the sun.
Keiran took a step toward her, then stopped, wincing in pain at the horrible burn on his chest, where she’d pressed the star against his heart.
Shadows flickered dimly around him, then disappeared altogether, as if the umbrae that had clung to him vanished with the closing of the door.
As if the power he’d wielded back in the grotto was all but spent.
When Keiran met her gaze, gone was the promise of violence. In its wake was a knot of confusion, an unbidden show of weakness, that left Emory wondering why she felt bad for him when he had just tried to kill them.
“What in the name of the holy fucking Tides is that?” Virgil shouted, pointing up at the sky—where great winged beasts blotted out the sun.
Emory could make out only their shadowed outlines from here, and though their eerie cries sounded distant, it was clear they were much larger than any bird should be.
A chill ran up her spine.
When she looked back at the arch where the door had been, Keiran was gone. But she knew it wouldn’t be the last she saw of him.