Below, Dovermere Cove was dotted with the light of a dozen fires or so. Baz remembered how much Romie had loved the bonfires when she’d gone with Emory last year, how she’d teased him for not going himself.
He thought he heard a bawdy tune being sung, and the revelries suddenly angered him, so out of place in such a site as Dovermere, with the recent casualties hanging over it. It was like death attracted students to it like flies to a corpse.
He paused his scratching of Dusk’s chin. Surely Emory wouldn’t have gone back… would she? She hadn’t even come to Romie’s funeral, for Tides’ sake. But if this was her own weird way to grieve… to face the horrors she’d lived through that night…
Shadow burn him.
Baz stuffed the note back in his pocket. “I’ll be back later,” he told the cat, unable to explain this urgency tugging at him. He didn’t want to go with all those students there, would probably be better off waiting to track down Emory tomorrow. But he had to know what brought Romie to Dovermere. What made his sister march so carelessly to her death.
He took the secret passage down to the beach, a steep stairwell etched in the rocky cliffside, so worn and overwhelmed with weeds and hanging vines, moss and grass, that no one except for the Eclipse students—namely himself—knew of its existence. His feet thudded quietly on the sand as he emerged from the tangle of vines. He was far enough away from the light of the fires that he knew no one saw him, but still he snuck toward the path that emerged from the tall grasses to make it seem like he was coming from town.
It was too dark for Baz to see the cave entrance from here, but he could feel the presence of the odd magic within, like static crawling along his skin.
He spotted the body a fraction of a second before someone screamed.
It floated in the water near the shore, unmistakably person-shaped.
And then a name was spoken against the wind, sparking a burst of horrid light in the hopeless pit of Baz’s heart. His ears rang, all the blood in his body rushing to his head as he followed the rest of the students congregating around the body of Quince Travers. Except it wasn’t a body at all, because Travers was alive. He was alive, and then he was not, all the life nearly drained out of him so that he was mere skin and bones.
Emory was at his side, trying to heal him through tears, and Baz knew enough of fear to recognize it plainly on her face. He saw the moment she lost her grip on her magic—felt her unraveling before he could spot the signs that something was very wrong indeed, because it was no longer her healing magic she was wielding, but the dark of the new moon and growth of the waxing moon and light of the full moon all at once, in a feat so impossible Baz wondered if he’d fallen down the steep stairs and hit his head, or slipped into one of Kai’s living nightmares.
But the horror twisting Emory’s features couldn’t be imagined. She wrenched away from Travers, away from the Amplifier’s grip, as death exploded from her hands.
Reaper magic. Emory—a Tides-damned Healer—was using Reaper magic.
Baz acted without thinking.
Instinct kicked in, snuffing out his better judgment. The fabric of time itself appeared to shift as he reached for its threads the way he’d done earlier today. The tendrils of light and ribbons of darkness and tangle of weeds around Travers’s unmoving form receded at his command, flowing back into Emory. It was like winding back a figurative clock to a time when these impossible powers had not yet manifested. The death magic was trickier, an intangible thing made to outwit time, to elude it, but Baz pushed against it with everything he had, all too conscious of that line between small magic and big magic, of how dangerously close he was to it, closer than he ever allowed himself to be.
He thought of his father and Kai, of how scared he was to meet the same fate. He nearly let go of his magic then, but at last, the cogs fell into place and death bent to time’s will, fading back to inexistence, to a moment when Emory had yet to wield it.
At once, Baz let go of the threads of time, heart beating a rapid pulse in his throat. Around him, no one seemed to have noticed what Emory had done, her strange powers there and gone in what would have felt to them like the blink of an eye, thanks to Baz’s magic.
It made little difference, in the end. Travers still sighed his last breath, face turned unseeing toward the sea as whatever degenerative process plaguing him dealt its final blow.
Silence hung over the beach like a shroud, unbroken but by the roar of waves. Emory’s wide-eyed gaze found Baz at the edge of the crowd. Her hands shook at her side, the New Moon sigil like a farce on her skin.
Impossibility filled the space between them. She was a Healer—he’d seen it firsthand as a child, how she would heal her own scrapes and bruises like it was nothing. She’d healed him once too. He still remembered how she had found him cowering from bullies shortly after his father’s Collapsing, how she’d healed the cut on his brow, not caring who saw, not afraid of him like the others were, a kindness he’d carried with him since.
But a Healer couldn’t also bend light and darkness or make things grow. A Healer couldn’t wield death at her fingertips. Power like that was impossible. It was the stuff of myth, echoing back to a time when people could call upon all magics, no matter their lunar house or tidal alignment. No one could use other magics than the singular one they were born with, not even those of House Eclipse—not since the Shadow and the first Eclipse-borns.
Unless Emory was exactly that.
Not a Healer, not from House New Moon at all, but something so rare it was only ever mentioned in books—something Baz had read about not even an hour ago.
She was a Tidecaller.
5 EMORY
VIRGIL WAS RIGHT IN SAYING death held a certain allure.
It had them all transfixed as the authorities came to examine the body—Healers and Shadowguides alike who assessed the nature of the wounds, confirmed the death. Students who had witnessed the horror recounted the event with morbid fascination, and every story remained the same: Quince Travers washed ashore and was revived for a moment before suffering a twisted, gruesome fate, which could only be attributed to the caves he’d drowned in and the unexplained magic that dwelled there.
Emory’s name was mentioned only to say she’d tried to heal him. No one spoke of what she’d done, of how she’d revealed herself to be not only a Healer, but somehow also a Lightkeeper and a Darkbearer, a Sower and a Reaper.
It was impossible. People could only wield the specific magic they were born with, and only during their ruling moon phase. Even bloodletting couldn’t grant them access to other magics, only their own. And yet… that night in the caves…
The blood rite and silver light, the whispers and the strange movement of time as the tide came unexpectedly quick, taking them all by surprise. Everything going black and loud and disorienting, a nightmare of a world trapped and churning in the confines of the Beast.
And in the midst of it all, something brushing against her magic. The resulting pressure in her veins, as if that something yearned to be set free.
Hadn’t she been on edge all summer, hearing her name in the sea breeze, seeing Dovermere in her dreams? She’d chalked it up to grief, the aftermath of such a traumatic experience, but now she recalled the overwhelming feeling of all those foreign magics rushing through her, the dark caress of death yearning to silence the frail heart below Travers’s rib cage, and she wasn’t so sure.