Chapter 25 Romie #2
“How else do you explain us three still being alive? Those students last year died because they didn’t have what it takes to travel through the sleepscape: Emory’s Tidecaller blood.”
Emory blanched. “You think they’d have survived if they’d had the compass with them?”
Vera nodded. “Protection against the absolute weirdness that is the space between worlds.” She fiddled with the compass, eyeing Emory.
“Adriana left this with you, right? Then she disappeared, and we know she somehow made it through the door, since she left the epilogue there for you to find.” She pointed to Romie at that.
“Maybe you Dreamers are made of different stuff than us and that means you’re able to withstand the sleepscape longer without the compass’s protection.
I don’t know. But without this thing guiding us, I don’t think we’d have found the Wychwood door.
It pointed us right to it, and then to the next door once we were in the Wychwood. ”
“And what about Keiran?” Emory asked.
“I thought we’d have to fight him once we realized he’d slipped through the door with us,” Nisha said, “but he suddenly didn’t seem to care about us.
He slipped right through our fingers, disappearing into shadows.
We hoped that might be the last we saw of him until we followed the compass and found him at the next door with you. ”
“Okay, back up,” Romie said, her head hurting.
“You got Baz to open the Hourglass, watched a Reanimator bring Tides-damned Keiran back to life, then managed to find us in the Wychwood thanks to Emory’s lost mother’s compass.
” She ticked off every statement on her fingers, each more ludicrous than the last. “Where is Baz in all of this?”
The three of them exchanged looks that unsettled Romie.
“Is he all right?” Emory asked in a small voice, echoing Romie’s thoughts.
“He’s fine,” Virgil said with forced confidence.
“We don’t know that,” Nisha corrected him.
Romie felt her nerves fraying. “Someone had better tell me where my brother is or I swear—”
“We lost him in the sleepscape,” Nisha relented with a sigh. “Him and Kai.”
“What do you mean you lost them? Are they—alive?”
“We don’t know.”
Romie felt dizzy. For a moment, it was as if she were back on the ley line having all her energy drained, or in the sleepscape with stars swirling around her, making her wonder where was up and where was down.
Her world was tilting on its axis. First Keiran coming back to life.
Then Aspen nearly dying, Emory’s apparent inability to Collapse despite using scores of magic, and the suspicion that she was leeching power from Romie. And now Baz…
No. He couldn’t be dead. Romie refused to even consider it.
“There was this kind of… opening,” Vera explained. “Almost like another portal forming within the sleepscape. It sucked Baz and Kai right in. One minute, they were with us, and the next, they were gone.”
Pulled into another door. Forced down another path.
“I’m sure they’ll be fine.” Virgil’s feigned cheeriness convinced no one. “They probably just ended up somewhere else in the sleepscape, right? Or maybe back in Dovermere. Anyway, with both their Collapsed powers, I’ve no doubt they can do just about anything.”
Romie clamped down on the worry that was threatening to pull her under. Virgil was right—he had to be, because she refused to believe her brother was gone.
“We should settle in for the night, wait for your friend here to wake up,” Vera said after a long silence.
The day was rapidly fading around them—too rapidly. The moon already hung low in the sky despite the sun still being out, tinting the world in hazy hues of orange and purple. An eerie sound pierced the quiet, a faraway beast, perhaps, like the mythical ones the warrior fought in Clover’s book.
Romie shuddered. “Let’s just hope whatever’s in this world lets us live till morning.”
“And that Keiran doesn’t come back to finish us off,” Virgil added. “I hope he gets his eyes plucked out by those giant-ass birds. He deserves every bit of pain after what he made you go through, Em.”
“What he made us all go through,” Emory said, her cheeks tinged pink as Virgil threw an arm around her and gave her a playful kiss atop the head.
“Yeah, but you especially,” Virgil said. “Playing with your heart like that… You were always far too good for him.”
“I swear if we’d known what he intended to do, we would have told you,” Nisha chimed in, squeezing Emory’s shoulder.
Emory very pointedly ignored Romie’s stare as the pieces suddenly fell into place.
It wasn’t just that Emory, like the rest of the Selenic Order, had been oblivious to Keiran’s true intentions. Something had happened between the two of them. Something Emory had been keeping from Romie after swearing there would be no more secrets between them.
Hurt and betrayal seared through Romie. As she watched the familiarity between the three of them, it struck her that these people she had gotten close to in secrecy last year, these friendships she’d made outside of Emory…
they weren’t hers alone now. Emory had as much of a claim on Virgil and Nisha as she did, perhaps even more after what they’d all gone through.
And Emory was the one keeping Romie out of the loop now, giving her a taste of her own medicine with this vital piece of the puzzle that she’d hidden from her.
It made sense, of course. Romie should have put it together before, but she’d been too caught up in everything else to see what was so obvious now.
She supposed in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter whether Emory and Keiran had been more than what Emory had let her believe, but it was the lying that bothered her.
Because if Emory had lied about this, what else was she keeping from her?
As Emory and Virgil looked over Aspen, and Vera ventured out to forage for some kind of edible plants, Romie volunteered to find firewood—or anything they could burn—along with Nisha.
With the sun rapidly going down, the desert had turned frigid, something Romie hadn’t thought possible in a world that Clover described as a forge, full of warmth and sunlight.
But then, the sickness Mrs. Amberyl had foreseen plaguing this world did involve a dimming sun, a world plunged into darkness.
Romie barely noticed the silence that fell over them as they walked away from the others, her thoughts still intent on Emory. She snapped out of it only when Nisha nudged her gently. “Everything all right with you?”
Romie mustered a smile. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I’m pretty sure you were about to pass out when we found you back in that grotto,” Nisha said, unconvinced. “And I don’t know. You seem preoccupied.”
Romie couldn’t help the rush of feelings that came back to her at this reminder that Nisha could always see right through her.
And Tides—Nisha was really here. It hit Romie all over again as she took her in.
Nisha looked just as she remembered—better, even.
Long lashes fluttering prettily against her high cheekbones.
Those dark eyes she could get lost in. Black hair unbound, tucked over one slender shoulder.
The disparity between the outfits they each wore was almost laughable: Nisha in a fine-knit sweater tucked into wide-legged corduroy pants complete with dainty brogues, and Romie in a lacy high-neck blouse and ample skirts that were at least a few centuries behind the fashion back in their world.
“I just can’t believe you’re here,” Romie breathed.
She wanted to reach out and touch Nisha, to solidify that this wasn’t all a twisted dream.
But she didn’t, reminded of how they’d left things before Romie had slipped through the Hourglass.
She swallowed past an unpleasant tightness in her throat. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
Nisha smiled timidly at that. “Does that mean you’re happy to see me?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I’m happy to see you.
You traveled across worlds for me… and Emory,” she added quickly.
It dawned on her that Nisha might have moved on from the brief romance they’d had, that she might have come here only for the friendship she’d made with Emory and not for the feelings she’d once had for Romie.
After all, Romie had messed things up between them, isolating herself in her search for the epilogue, losing everything and everyone she cared for in her all-consuming pursuit of destiny.
“So what’s bothering you, then?”
Romie chewed on the inside of her cheek.
She wanted to let it all pour out of her, how it had felt like Emory was leeching from Romie’s power when she stood on that ley line, how betrayed she was that Emory had lied about Keiran.
How she couldn’t yet bring herself to voice her suspicions that Emory might indeed be a Tidethief, as the slur went.
Instead, Romie said, “Remember when you last found me in the greenhouse?”
“Before your initiation?” Nisha asked, taken aback.
Romie nodded, smiling fondly at the memory.
The greenhouse had always been theirs, and it was no wonder that Nisha had found her there before Romie slipped through worlds.
Nisha had told her the time and place she was expected at Dovermere for the Selenic Order initiation, and though she hadn’t explicitly told Romie not to go, Romie remembered her worry.
“You told me to be careful,” Romie said. “And I… you left before I could say anything, but I remember swearing to myself that I’d see you on the other side. That if I made it through the initiation ritual and survived Dovermere, I’d come back and make things right between us.”
Nisha’s eyes blazed as if they housed the remnants of the fading sun. “I remember hoping for the same thing.”
“Do you think it’s too late now?” Romie asked, heart in her throat, skin hot at the intensity in Nisha’s gaze.
She wasn’t sure where this blatant honesty was coming from—maybe it had something to do with nearly dying at the hands of a demon wearing a resurrected Keiran’s face and her own best friend’s magic.
But if she didn’t ask now, she wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to later.
“No.” Nisha stepped closer to her. “I would have waited for you however long it took.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Romie wasn’t sure who made the first move, but suddenly they were kissing, Nisha’s hands laced behind her neck, and Romie’s tangled up in her silky hair.
Romie lost herself in the warmth and familiarity of Nisha’s lips, transported back to before, to the early days at Aldryn College when everything had been exciting and new.
When she’d been falling head over heels for Nisha, sneaking kisses in the greenhouse, just a normal girl doing normal girl things.
Before the Order had sucked her in, before the song had snuck into her dreams, before the hunt for the lost epilogue had consumed her whole.
Romie clung to this moment of normalcy, the utter bliss of Nisha’s kiss. It was like nothing had changed between them, even as everything was changing around them.
The rest of her world might be imploding, but this, at least, was something to hold fast to.