Emory, Emory.
It was just a memory, she tried to tell herself. It wasn’t real.
Come find us, Emory.
A shiver up her spine. “Did you hear that?”
Keiran frowned, still gripping her wrist. “Hear what?”
Before she could answer, someone screamed—a high-pitched thing in the night that rose and broke like waves yielding against rock.
She turned toward the sound. A student stood a little farther down the beach, pointing at something in the water: a dark, floating mass pulled in by the tide.
No, not something, Emory realized.
Someone.
The world went still.
For a beat, no one moved, and even the sea seemed to pause. Emory stood rooted at the edge of the water, her breath coming in fast and shallow, blood pounding in her ears. She watched numbly as Keiran sloshed into the water and a few other students followed closely behind him. They reached the body, dragged it back to shore. From where she stood, it looked like a young man, and though Emory was here and now, she was suddenly transported back to last spring, when she was the one dragging herself from the sea, fingers clasped around another’s body.
Someone swore loudly. “It’s Quince Travers!”
Emory blinked. The words were so impossible she thought she must have dreamed them. They meant someone else, had to mean someone else. Or maybe this was indeed a dream—a nightmare.
Her feet started moving without her telling them to, and then she was standing with the others, looking over Keiran’s shoulder at the body sprawled on the sand.
His face came into view, and Emory stumbled back.
It was indeed Quince Travers, with his constellation of freckles, his unmistakable shock of red hair and wiry frame. Quince Travers, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn that night four months ago when the sea claimed him.
His body didn’t have a scratch on it, only a few stray weeds and barnacles tangled in his clothes, slick algae clinging to his hair. His skin wasn’t bloated from staying so long in the water, nor wrecked from being battered against the cliffside. He looked… alive, his cheeks still rosy with the faint glow of life.
Keiran lowered his ear to Travers’s chest—and jerked back with a swear as the boy’s eyes shot open.
Travers did not spew water, nor even draw breath. He merely sat up, empty eyes searching the faces around him until, impossibly, they landed on Emory. His mouth opened, and the words that came out were an indistinct gargle as water trickled down the sides of his mouth.
Emory, Emory, the sea whispered.
And suddenly Travers convulsed, collapsing on the ground. He seized and frothed at the mouth, his eyes so wide the whites around his pupils showed.
Keiran looked up at Emory, yelled something about healing him—because of course she could heal him. She was a Healer of House New Moon. Her magic could save him, just as it had saved her that night.
But Emory couldn’t tear her eyes away from Travers, couldn’t get her feet to move or even remember how to breathe. It made no sense. They were all supposed to be dead. It didn’t matter that there had only been four bodies accounted for that night, the other four lost at sea. It wasn’t unheard of that those who ventured inside Dovermere lay trapped there, the currents entombing them in the confines of the caves, their bones bound to turn up eventually in some fisherman’s net.
But here was Travers. Whole. Alive—though perhaps not for much longer if she didn’t do something.
In his seizing, his eyes met hers again, and she could plainly read the accusation there.
Your fault.
She caught sight of the inside of his wrist, where the spiral on his skin had begun to bleed black. As if death were readying its final blow.
Someone pushed past her and knelt beside Travers. Another Healer, an upperclassman she recognized as a teacher’s assistant in one of her classes.
“Emory,” Keiran snapped. “Help him.”
His voice pushed her to action. She moved past the fear and dropped to her knees across from the other Healer. Louis, she thought his name was. He looked bleary-eyed, unsteady, his labored breathing smelling of alcohol. If he was inebriated past the point of having any sort of grasp on his magic…
Heaving a shaky sigh, Emory laid a hand on Travers’s chest and tugged on her magic. It answered willingly under the new moon sky, the pressure in her veins instantly lessening.
She felt the magic start to work. Travers’s convulsions slowed, then came to a stop. Someone behind her breathed a sigh of relief, thanking the Tides. But now his skin was horridly pallid. Gone was the rosy flush that had been there before. Gone, too, was the light in his eyes; they were milky white, the skin around them all shriveled up. His cheeks were caving in, the skin on his face growing sallow and tight, as if he were aging faster than he should be, deteriorating before their very eyes.
“What the fuck is happening to him?” someone cried out.
Louis pulled away from Travers with a defeated look. “I don’t think my magic’s helping,” he mumbled before doubling over and retching on the sand.
Keiran caught her eye. “Have you got this on your own?”
“I… I don’t know,” Emory admitted, on the verge of tears. “I don’t understand what’s happening to him.”
“Liza,” Keiran called, producing a switchblade he shoved in the redhead’s hand. “Help her.”
Emory watched incomprehensibly as Lizaveta slashed her palm before dunking her hand into the sea, head tilted back, lips moving in what looked like a silent prayer to the night sky. It dawned on Emory that she was bloodletting to call upon her dormant waxing moon magic—though how it might help heal Travers was beyond her.
She frowned as Lizaveta came to stand beside her and rested her wet, bloodied hand on her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
Lizaveta’s ice-chip eyes were steady and sure. “Don’t fight it.”
It was like the doors to Emory’s magic were thrown wide open, and everything around her became too sharp. The pressure in her veins inexplicably returned, so intense she bit back a sob. She could practically taste the magic in the air, the surge of power that trickled down to her fingertips at Lizaveta’s touch.
An Amplifier’s touch.
“Try healing him now,” Lizaveta urged. “Hurry.”
Emory turned back to Travers, but it wasn’t really Travers anymore. It was a hulking shell of a person withering before her, emaciated skin stretched too thin over bones. She could almost see his heart through his rib cage, beating fainter by the second.
Emory couldn’t let him die.
The power in her veins was all too eager to answer Lizaveta’s touch. Her amplified healing magic surged into Travers’s body, but it still wasn’t enough, still didn’t slow down the deterioration.
“It’s not working,” she cried.
She needed more. Without warning, Lizaveta flung everything she had into Emory, fingers digging painfully into her shoulder. Where before, her amplifying magic had been a mere trickle of power, it became a riptide, pulling Emory under. She buckled under the weight of it, fighting for control as hollow echoes of mediocre rang in her mind. Her magic plunged to depths unknown, and as she reached the bottom of her well of power, something twisted and wrong rose to greet her, the very same something she’d felt all summer. The magic in her blood ebbed and flowed, answering a tide she couldn’t see, didn’t know. With it, that pressure in her veins mounted until it hurt, and she wanted to scream. It was as if Lizaveta’s amplifying magic had thrown open a floodgate she’d been trying desperately to hold shut until now.