Baz pressed his lips together, glancing around uneasily.
“You don’t have to decide tonight,” Emory suggested at his hesitation. “We can meet up tomorrow before class, figure out how to go about this. I just… Please don’t go to the dean. I don’t want to be sent to the Institute.”
His gaze found hers and held it this time. She could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the conflicted emotions churning in them at her plea. She saw the moment his decision skewed in her favor by the way his shoulders drooped. He gave a resigned sigh. “Fine. Tomorrow morning at seven. I’ll keep this between us until then.”
Before she could say anything, Baz took a step back, holding up a hand as if to ward her off. “Right now, I need to think. Just… let me think this through.”
“Of course,” Emory breathed. “Thank you, Baz.” The words felt entirely inadequate.
Baz turned from her, and she was left to watch his figure recede down the path that cut toward town. She was alone, yet she got the impression someone was watching her again. Dovermere’s looming presence, perhaps, or the lingering blame in Travers’s eyes.
Emory tipped her head back to the sky, wondering at the moonless expanse she’d once regarded so fondly. It held no kinship now, only questions and cold, distant stars that looked down on her as accusingly as they had last spring. She still couldn’t refute them, not with the memory of death on her fingertips.
* * *
Dovermere calls to her in a dream.
She enters a world of foreboding darkness where the only marker of time is the strange, slow dripping of water. The breathing silence of Dovermere walks beside her, unsettlingly alive.
She finds them in a ring around a great silver hourglass. Fine black sand falls from one elongated bulb to the other. She watches as they bring their hands against the glass. Flowers bloom in the top bulb, narcissus and hollyhock, orchid and poppy, shifting with the sand slowly swirling down.
And now blood mars the surface of the hourglass where eight red hands claw at it, desperate to break it, but the glass does not shatter. Flowers drop in the bottom bulb and bodies drop in answer. Their time is up, and Emory tries to move, to help, to speak, but she is here and not here, and she thinks they do not see her until a boy with red hair turns to her.
“Emory,” says Travers. Water spills from his open mouth, black and oozing like blood. “Help us.”
Black narcissus blooms sprout from his ears and lips and skin like fungi on a cadaver, because that is what he is becoming, bone and shadow and lifeless eyes, death personified.
“This is your fault.”
Travers crumbles. Buds sprout from his corpse. They spread on the algae-slick rock and feed into the pools of salt water until nothing remains but a mound of narcissus in the deep.
Emory looks at her hands, where the ink of a new moon runs like blackened blood. A diamondlike narcissus appears in her palm, delicate, ethereal, damning. It slips from her fingers and shatters on the cave floor like glass as a monstrous screech echoes, out of place and out of time. A shiver runs up her spine. There is a wrongness to the shadows lengthening around her and those that claw at the inside of the hourglass, looking to shatter it from within.
The
glass
breaks
and black sand and wilted flowers that turn to ash and fearsome beasts forged in the Deep burst forth, a tidal wave of nightmares—
* * *
Emory woke with a gasp.
The clothes she’d fallen asleep in were damp from sweat. She didn’t remember dozing off, had merely lain here on top of her bed, staring at the ceiling as images of Travers plagued her. All summer she’d had these dreams of Dovermere, perhaps more memory than dream, fragments of reality trapped in amber, though nothing ever as clear or as chilling as this. Nothing that ever felt so real.
She looked at Romie’s empty bed, wishing she were here to make sense of it.
Your fault.
Emory sprang up and sat at her desk, retrieving the birth certificate she kept stashed in a drawer. It clearly stated the lunar phase she was born on—new moon—as well as the location of her birth, some small port town on the western coast of Trevel, where the Aldersea met the Trevelsea.
She was adamant there was no way she was Eclipse-born, but for good measure, she scribbled two hasty lines on a piece of paper:
Could Luce have lied about my birth? Weird magic—need answers.
She slipped the letter inside an envelope she addressed to her father. There was no other way to reach him in the remote area where he lived—the lighthouse at the edge of the world, he liked to call it—since the telephone lines that had become all the rage across Elegy and beyond had yet to make their way to the tiny hovel that was Harebell Cove. Emory affixed a sepia-toned postage stamp depicting a familiar coastline, her heart lurching at the image of smooth rocks lapped by frothy waves; all it was missing to be a perfect picture of home were the fields of harebells sighing toward the sea, her father’s white clapboard lighthouse standing firm against the wind.
Outside, the sky was graying with the approaching dawn, thick mist clinging to the school grounds. Emory changed, hopped on an old school-issued bicycle, and cycled down to the post office at the edge of town. She liked Cadence this way, cloaked in fog, quiet save for the peal of a bell down at the harbor and the answering call of seagulls. It reminded her of home.
She slipped her letter in the box attached to the front of the post office, a squat stone building with ivy-clad walls and a tattered shingle roof. She could only hope her father had the answers she sought.
The way Henry spoke of Luce had always enticed Emory as a child. Luce was a Dreamer who’d left her home to see the world, and to a girl growing up in the middle of nowhere, having a sailor for a mother was quite the romantic concept. Emory had dreamed of having both parents at her side, one half at sea and the other on land. How often she’d imagined her mother coming back for her. The two of them would sail toward the horizon together, and that lighthouse would always be there to guide them home.
Even as her childish wonder gave way to anger and resentment at being abandoned, Emory still found ways to romanticize the idea of her mother. Luce roamed the world unburdened by the concepts of home and duty, free to carve her own path wherever the currents led her. It was probably why Emory had been so drawn to Romie when she first met her at Threnody Prep, another Dreamer with wild notions who could never stand still for very long, always looking toward the next irresistible thing.
Romie herself had been quite taken by the idea of Emory’s mother.
“I want to be like her,” she’d stated.
At first the comment had baffled Emory. “Why?”
“Everyone I know, it’s like they’re here but not really living, you know? They’re stuck in their comfortable routines and boring old lives, and I want more than that. I want to sail away like your mom, go on a new adventure every day, meet new people, fall in love, try everything the world has to offer. Now, that’s living.”
Emory had told herself she’d wanted all that too, though in reality her ambitions were much more practical, starting with Get into Aldryn College so you don’t become a magical reject. It was easy to be swept up in Romie’s grand ideas, this hunger she had for more. But just like Luce, that drive only seemed to push Romie to keep secrets, leaving those she loved behind to put the pieces together in her absence.
There was the sound of a bicycle bell, and out of the mist a boy appeared, rushing past Emory as he threw a stack of newspapers at her feet.
The headline made her stomach turn.
BODY OF DECEASED ALDRYN STUDENT RESURFACES MONTHS AFTER DROWNING IN DOVERMERE CAVES.
A shiver licked up the back of her neck. She imagined Travers’s emaciated form emerging from the mist, nightmarish claws and elongated limbs reaching for her.