Chapter 26 Emory #2
“She disappeared years ago looking for Clover’s epilogue,” Vera continued. “Set out from Trevel and sailed across the seas to find it.” She frowned at the compass in her hand before holding it out to Emory. “You should have this.”
“Keep it,” Emory said, trying to hold back the bitterness from her words. “It was never really mine to begin with.”
Just like her mother. This woman she had never known, who’d had an entire family to love and be loved by, people to remember her long after she was gone. People who knew her when Emory never would.
Adriana Kazan—the real woman, the person behind all the mystery—seemed to belong to everyone but Emory. She had only ever known her mother as Luce Meraude, the sailor. A storybook character that her younger self could fantasize about, a fabricated persona she was free to dream up in her mind.
That person belonged to no one but the sea.
There wasn’t a single version of her mother that was hers, and holding a damn compass wouldn’t change that.
Emory stopped dead in her tracks, stumbling as a familiar energy hummed beneath her feet.
Vera steadied her. “What’s wrong?”
As the others caught up to them, Emory’s eyes went to Aspen. “Do you feel that? It’s like the ley line in the Wychwood.”
Aspen tilted her head, as if listening to the air and the earth, hoping to learn their rhythms the way she’d been attuned to the Wychwood’s. “I think I’d be powerful enough to scry here.”
Romie tensed, looking between the two of them like she was ready to tackle them off the ley line if she must. “Don’t you think it’d be best to keep the scrying off the ley line? After what happened to Bryony…”
But Aspen seemed undeterred. “I’m not my sister. Besides, the thing that possessed her is already possessing another.”
Keiran.
Before anyone could stop her, Aspen plopped down on the ground and grabbed fistfuls of dirt. She let the red earth fall from one hand to the other, watching it as if the motion were hypnotizing. And perhaps it was, because her eyes grew filmy again, indicating she was scrying.
Emory’s heart raced. There was an odd tingling at her fingertips, a hunger in her that had nothing to do with her empty stomach. She could feel Aspen’s magic as it worked, smell its sweet, earthy scent. It called to her in a way she didn’t understand.
She watched mesmerized as Aspen’s eyes jumped unseeing from side to side. And when they stopped moving, Aspen gasped—and Emory along with her.
Emory was no longer seeing the world as she had a second earlier.
Gone was the barren landscape and her friends, gone was the feeling of weak sunlight on her skin.
She was in a dark tunnel, standing guard outside what looked like a cell.
She wore golden chain mail, and a sword hung at her hip.
This wasn’t her body. It was corded with muscles she didn’t have, had suffered through hurts she’d never known.
The heart beating in her chest felt heavy, made of something other than connective tissue and fibrous muscle. Something warm and bright and magical.
A monstrous growl shook the walls.
Emory stumbled as she returned to her body. She was again looking at that barren land, and her friends’ concerned faces. They weren’t looking at her, though—they were looking at Aspen.
“That wasn’t Tol,” the witch said with a frown. “I felt him near, but something’s blocking me from him.”
Emory’s heart pounded as she tried to make sense of what happened.
She had seen this, just as Aspen had. She’d felt this undeniable pull toward Aspen, her magic, and then she was scrying along with the witch.
How could that be possible? She was a Tidecaller, able to draw on lunar magics, not magic from other worlds.
This ley line was doing something to her. Could it have opened her up to other kinds of magic? She could feel the residual power from Aspen on this very spot, could feel it traveling beneath her feet like a live wire calling her name, begging her to grab hold of it, use it as her own.
Her friends’ chatter grew distant. Emory had to get off the ley line or she felt like she might burst. The scorching heat expected of this world was only mild at best, yet she was sweating profusely, something electric traveling in her veins.
There was a darkness pressing in all around her now.
Emory took a few stumbling steps, trying desperately to get off the ley line.
“Em, you okay?” Virgil called out behind her.
Before she could answer him, Emory fell, her vision going dark.
She did not know that falling into unconsciousness would involve actual falling. But that was the sensation she got, interminable and heart-lurchingly fast. Then at last everything stopped.
She was in the sleepscape again, or rather, it looked like she was beneath it.
She stood in utter darkness, solid obsidian under her feet, and above her was a black expanse filled with stars that hung threateningly low.
It was, Emory realized, as if she’d fallen past the bridge of stars and into this darkly glittering pit.
“Hello again.”
Emory whirled at this voice she knew too well. The demon wearing Keiran’s face stood behind her. He smiled at her with the unsettling mannerisms of Keiran, all cool confidence and ease, nothing like the murderous demon she’d faced off against in the grotto.
“What did you do to me?”
“So quick to cast blame.” Keiran-not-Keiran tutted. “You’re the one who fainted. I merely called your consciousness here.”
“And where is here?” She threw a wary glance around her. “What is this place?”
“It is many things and nothing at all. It is liminal. A seam between time and space and planes of existence.”
“The sleepscape.”
“Not quite. A little pocket that exists at the edge of it, if you will.”
Emory hoped that meant neither of them was corporeal—that he couldn’t hurt her here. The memory of his fingers wrapped around her throat made her retreat a step, bracing defensively. “If you’re going to kill me, go on with it.”
Heat flared in the depths of his eyes. “I am not going to kill you.”
The yet dangled unspoken at the end of his sentence, evident in the cruel tilt of his mouth.
Emory swallowed past the tightness in her throat. He looked so much like Keiran, but she knew it wasn’t him, couldn’t be.
“Tell me what you are,” she demanded, affecting a bravado she did not feel in the slightest.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Keiran-not-Keiran stepped toward her, shadows swirling in his wake.
She tried not to flinch as he appeared to tower over her.
“I am that which dwells in the dark between stars,” he said, and his voice echoed oddly around them.
“How disappointing that one such as yourself can’t put it together. ”
Emory’s pulse raced. “But you’re not an umbra.”
“Don’t insult me. The umbrae are mere nightmares—echoes of consciousness, fear given form.
” His eyes narrowed to slits as he took her in from head to toe.
“You took a horde of them away from me a while back. I felt it, the moment their blackened souls vanished from the sleeping realm. The same way you got rid of those that were with me yesterday.” He cocked his head to the side. “What did you do to them?”
She tilted her chin up. “I set them free.”
Keiran watched her with faint amusement, but there was something else hiding behind his eyes, a sort of wonder bordering on anger that Emory couldn’t begin to understand.
“I have not felt that kind of power in a long time,” he said.
“Do you even know what you could do with it? The things you could accomplish. The doors you might open.”
Emory’s mouth went dry. The question felt so much like Keiran that for a second, she got lost in his gaze, in his words, in the alluring quality of his voice.
She couldn’t help it. It struck something within her, got under her skin.
And Tides, she hated herself for it. Hadn’t she been in this same position before?
Listening to Keiran’s promises, fooled by his lies, drinking it all up like she was a faithful servant worshipping at the altar of some dark, powerful god.
He had appealed to her thirst for power, her search for significance, and she had bent to him so easily, she should have been embarrassed for it.
But at the time, nothing had felt so right.
And all it did in the end was lead to a heap of hurt and death.
Emory wouldn’t let herself get swayed like that again.
“I know enough,” she said, willing iron into her voice.
“Do you, now? And yet you are leading the pieces of her to the godsworld without knowing what it will do. You call yourself Tidecaller, but you don’t even know what that means.”
Emory refused to let him get under her skin, even as a million questions came to mind. “Tell me what it means, then.”
“Are you always this demanding of your betters?”
“My betters?”
“I imagine it’s that death wish of yours.
I seem to recall you saying it’s what you deserve.
” He drew so close, she could see all the unnatural details of his eyes.
The outer ring of pure obsidian, the golds and silvers around his pupils that flared brighter, almost molten, as he held her gaze.
“All that potential, and you would so carelessly let it sputter out?”
Emory did not dare to answer. She felt dizzy with fear, her pulse racing to a painful throb.
Keiran stared at a spot behind her. “Perhaps you’ll get your wish after all.” Then, lowering his mouth to her ear: “If I were you, I’d run.”
He gave her a shove, and then she was being pulled up into consciousness again, the strange, dark world around her dissolving.
Emory opened her eyes to the red-hued desert.
Hands were shaking her, and for a panicked moment Emory thought the demon had followed her here.
But it was Virgil’s face she was looking up at, Virgil’s voice that pierced through the fog of her mind.
“Run!”
A horrible screeching sound had them both putting their hands over their ears and looking up at the sky.
Where a great winged beast stretched its sharp talons toward them.