Chapter 50 Kai
“IF ANOTHER LIbrARIAN OR, TIDES forbid, a professor finds out I’m practicing magic with Eclipse-born students in secret, I’ll get fired.” Luce grimaced. “Or worse.”
“Wouldn’t enrolling as a student have been easier?” Kai asked with a raised brow. They were getting settled in the secret library room, waiting for Thames to come and map out the sleepscape with them.
“The school year was already underway when I got here, and it would have involved documentation I didn’t have and couldn’t exactly forge.
Applying for an open librarian post seemed the easiest way to stay close to Cornelius.
” Luce smiled to herself. “When I first met him—as a librarian, that is, before I told him the truth of who I was—I introduced him to a book I’d brought with me from my time. Dark Tides.”
“I’m familiar with it.” It made sense now, why they’d found that book in Clover’s room—a book believed to have been published after his time.
“So you know the strange topics it touches on,” Luce said. “I thought it was the perfect way to ease into my big revelation, because, well, Hello, I’m your four-times-great-granddaughter from the future sounds like something I’d get locked up for.”
“So is being a Tidecaller.”
Luce gasped with mock affront. “Are you suggesting I could have used my ancestor’s secret magic as a bargaining chip to save my own ass? Where’s your loyalty?”
My only loyalty’s to the four-eyed nerd currently studying with your ancestor, Kai thought with a wry smile. This, thankfully, he kept to himself.
“It’s funny,” Luce continued. “I have all this knowledge of Song of the Drowned Gods, but I can’t say anything to Cornelius about it.
And I have all these preconceived notions on what his life should look like, yet the reality is so much different.
So much less… mythical. He’s powerful and magnetic, sure, but he’s just a man, after all.
Makes me think Song of the Drowned Gods is nothing but a fictional story. ”
“I thought you Veiled Atlas fanatics were supposed to believe Clover actually went through other worlds.”
“Who’s to say he still won’t? If his dreams are any indication, he has seen these other worlds he’ll end up writing about one day.
A verdant wood. An arid land full of beasts.
A mountainous peak.” Her eyes sparked as she said, “If we manage to go through the door, we might just see them for ourselves.”
A thought crossed Kai’s mind. “You had a compass-watch of some kind that had the Veiled Atlas initials carved into it.”
“You know about that?”
“You left it with Emory, so yeah. What I don’t know is what it’s supposed to do.”
“Nothing. It’s broken, just a family heirloom that got passed down to me. I left it with Emory so that she’d have a piece of me to hold on to, should anything ever happen to me.”
Like going back in time and being absent from her daughter’s life for nineteen years.
“Well, it’s not exactly broken, just so you know,” Kai said. “It seems to work when you bring it into the sleepscape.”
Luce’s eyes were bright with stars. “I still can’t believe you’ve stepped into the actual realm of dreams.”
“I imagine you will too, if you’re meant to leave the epilogue there for us to find.”
“What?”
Kai realized his blunder at Luce’s wide eyes.
He and Baz hadn’t told her of the epilogue yet.
Kai reached for the folded page in his pocket.
He told her how he and Romie had found it in the sleepscape.
“We believe you’re the one who put it there.
Or will put it there, I guess.” Though Kai supposed any one of them could be the one to leave it in the sleepscape while they were here in the past—if they found a way back through the Hourglass, that is.
Kai handed Luce the epilogue without thinking. She reached for it like it was a mythical thing, and it might as well have been—she had spent years trying to find it, sailing across the seas in search of it. And here it now was, in her hands, for the very first time.
Luce frowned as she reached the end of the epilogue, eyes glistening with some emotion Kai didn’t understand. “This Dreamer friend of yours… you told me she’s friends with my daughter?”
Kai nodded. “She and I searched for the epilogue together. We found we could go farther in the sleepscape together than alone.” A thought occurred to him. “I saw her and Emory in the sleepscape. I’ve been able to slip into Emory’s nightmares even though we’re worlds and centuries apart.”
The revelation didn’t seem to faze Luce in the slightest. “I experienced the same thing with Cornelius. When I was still in my time, I’d get glimpses of him in my dreams.”
“When I saw you and Thames in Clover’s nightmare, there were these threads between you.
Not between you and Thames—but tying both of you to Clover.
” Like they were three points of an incomplete triangle, with Clover as the connecting tether.
The same way it had been with him, Emory, and Romie.
“I think there’s a connection between Tidecallers and us Dreamers and Nightmare Weavers.
This sort of dream-bond that allows us to contact each other in sleep, no matter what limitations might hinder us. ”
Luce looked him over, slow realization dawning. “If you can connect with Emory…”
“I could warn her. Tell her of this vision you and Clover saw. And you could come with me, if you’d like to meet her.”
Emotions seemed to war behind Luce’s eyes. At last, she said, “On one condition: you don’t tell her who I am.”
Kai thought that was ridiculous; she looked so much like Emory, there was no way she wouldn’t put the pieces together herself.
“Should we get Baz to come with us?” Luce asked, motioning to the door.
“Baz?”
“He’s close with Emory, isn’t he?”
“Yes… but he’s not a Dreamer.”
“Oh, I know that. But my specialty is taking things into the sleepscape. I’ve been known to do a few buddy-sleeps in my time.”
Buddy-sleeps. Kai had heard of the practice—Dreamers bringing non-Dreamers along with them in the sleepscape, guiding their sleeping consciousness to follow theirs. It was banned back in his time, too many non-Dreamers having been lost that way and becoming eternal sleepers.
As if reading his concern, Luce added, “I’m quite talented, I assure you.”
Kai didn’t doubt it. He was more concerned about the promise he’d made Emory last time. About Baz finding out he’d spoken to her and kept it from him. “I think it’s best if only the two of us go.”
Luce’s smile was eager. “All right, then, nightmare boy. Let’s set sail through the dark.”
They found Emory more easily than Kai had on his own.
Perhaps it was Luce’s presence that made it so easy to navigate the stars and the darkness, amplifying this bond between him and Emory.
“It’s you again,” Emory breathed when she saw him. There was no struggling with reality this time; she knew, as he did, that this was real. She only frowned in confusion as she caught sight of Luce hovering behind him. “Who’s she?”
“A Dreamer,” Kai said. “I needed the boost to find you again.”
He kept his promise not to divulge anything more, though judging by Emory’s lingering gaze on Luce—and Luce making no attempt to hide the emotions on her face, lips parted in awe, unshed tears glistening like stars in her eyes—he suspected the truth was plain enough to see.
“Did you tell Baz about this?” Emory asked.
Kai’s jaw tightened. “No. And he’d have my head if he knew I was here now.” He really needed to stop making all these promises. He was the Nightmare Weaver, not the Tides-damned Keeper of Everyone’s Secrets.
“Thank you.”
Kai studied her pale features, the sallowness of her face. “Are you okay?”
Emory turned her face up to the stars above. “Things are really bad, Kai.” Her voice broke. “I keep hurting everyone around me, and I’m scared that I don’t know how to stop. Romie’s right: I really am a Tidethief. And if I keep going like this, I’ll lose her all over again.”
Kai met Luce’s eye. How the hell were they supposed to tell her now? And what good would it do, really, if Clover succeeded at changing history?
“Just… hang in there, all right?” He only now noticed the darkness gathering at the edges of the sleepscape, the tendrils of it flitting to Emory, as if called by her turmoil. “You’re not alone in this.”
She huffed a sad laugh at that. “I am, though. I have to be. Otherwise, I’ll end up hurting them all, one way or another. I always do.”
The darkness around them rearranged itself so that they were in the Belly of the Beast, surrounded by all the students who’d flung accusations at her the last time they were in this same nightmare together.
Except now the students were cadavers, a pile of them laid out at Emory’s feet.
Rotting lunar flowers grew from their empty eye sockets and between their blue-tinged lips.
And then there was Romie, turning white as a sheet and withered as a leaf as all the blood left her veins.
Beside her, a girl Kai didn’t know, her bones breaking at gruesome angles until she was a heap of nothing on the floor, and a boy who clutched at his heart and fell to his knees as the light left his eyes.
“See?” Emory said, watching as everyone around her turned to dust. “They’ll all die because of me. I’m cursed.” She made a strangled sound, a feverish look in her eye. “Maybe I’m Shadow-cursed.”
“Shadow-cursed?” Kai echoed. “Emory, did you Collapse?”
“Kai…”
He spun at Luce’s voice to see a horde of umbrae had found their way in—and one of them had its claws around Luce’s throat.
Looking to take the Dreamer’s soul.
“No!” Kai reached for Luce, hoping he wasn’t too late as he absorbed the umbrae into him. “We need to wake up now.”
Luce clung to him weakly, face drawn, but she was still here, still herself. She glanced back at Emory, who stared at them wide-eyed, tears running down her cheeks. The umbrae steered clear of her, as if she were one of them.
“Wake up,” Kai growled.
And she must have, because suddenly he and Luce were back in the library—along with the darkness that Kai had brought back with him.