Romie swore, wiping furiously at her tear-stained face. “Well, I’m not.”
She drew Emory in for another hug, biting down a sob, and Emory didn’t care that the weight and feel of her felt off, only that she was here.
And then Romie pulled back, shoving at her.
“Ow,” Emory bit out.
“You stupid asshole. Why did you have to follow me that night? What the fuck were you thinking, going to Dovermere like that?”
“Me? What about you? Risking your life to join the Selenic Order just so you could get a taste for other magics?”
Romie flinched. “You know about that?”
“Yes, I know about that.” Emory showed her the glowing mark on her wrist. “I’m one of them now.”
Romie lifted her arm in mirror to Emory’s. Her own mark glowed silver—not black, thankfully.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” Emory pushed her sleeve down. She couldn’t quite keep the anger from her voice. “We’re supposed to tell each other everything, Ro.”
Color rose in Romie’s cheeks. She crossed her arms defensively. “I couldn’t say anything, could I? It’s called a secret society for a reason.”
“Yeah, well, it sucked. All this time, you had me thinking you didn’t want to be friends anymore. That you’d finally had enough of me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“How am I being ridiculous? This is what you do, Romie. You get bored of things and people and leave them behind to chase after more exciting prospects.”
“I would never do that to you.”
“You did, though.” Her voice broke. “You did. And look where it got you.”
She expected Romie to counter with more defiance, but was taken aback when she deflated, looking contrite. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Em. I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I just…” Romie cast a look around the sleepscape. Unshed tears glistened like stars in her eyes. “Did the others make it?” she asked quietly. “Serena, Dania, Harlow, Daphné?”
Four broken bodies on the sand.
“I’m sorry,” Emory said. “They’re dead.”
Romie only nodded, swallowed. As if she had expected this.
“What happened to you, Ro?”
Romie blew out a breath. “When the tide rushed in… I had my eyes open through the whole thing. The waves were spinning us around the Hourglass, and it opened, Em. It really opened, and before I knew it, I was through.”
“The door to the Deep.”
Romie pursed her lips. “I’d been dreaming of it, you know. There was this song in my sleep, always calling me to Dovermere. Just like in Song of the Drowned Gods.” She laughed harshly. “I became obsessed with finding the epilogue because I was so sure it was the key to lead me to the next world. I thought having access to the kind of magic the Order has might help me find it. Instead that fucking ritual brought me to the Tides-damned sleepscape.”
Emory frowned. “The sleepscape? You mean all this time, you’ve been asleep?”
“No, that’s why it doesn’t make any sense, because I’m awake.” Romie glanced around them with a frown. “It’s as if I’m in the sleepscape but not. Like it’s some sort of… in-between, and I’m stuck here whether I’m sleeping or waking. I’ve tried reaching for dreams, but it feels off. I only managed it with you, and even then, it was hard to do. Like trying to call out to you from too far a distance.”
Emory repressed a shiver. “We think… We think you might be in some kind of liminal space between our world and the Deep.”
Romie gave a harsh laugh. “Purgatory, huh? Figures.”
“Is Jordyn with you?”
“He is.” A hesitancy in her eyes, her voice. “An umbra got to him early on. I’ve been tending to him, making sure he doesn’t succumb to the umbrae’s pull, but he hasn’t been the same since.”
Romie hugged her arms. “I wanted to keep looking for the epilogue because I can feel it, Em. It’s here somewhere, and it’s the key to everything. It still calls out to me, that fucking song I can’t shake. We tried going after it together, the four of us, but the others… They didn’t acclimate well, not like I did. The farther down the path we went, the worse it got. They’d start bleeding from their noses and ears and would find it hard to breathe. So we had to turn back and stay here. I watched over them, fighting the urge to follow the song, because without me, I don’t know… I don’t think this place is meant for those who aren’t Dreamers.” She frowned at Emory. “However it is you got here, you need to be careful.”
“I’ll be fine. But what happened to Travers and Lia?” Emory asked, hoping Romie could provide an explanation for their washing up onshore. Wondering if she even knew of the horrible fate they had suffered.
“First it was Travers,” Romie said grimly. “He kept hearing a voice. But not like my voice, not like the music in my dream. He said this voice was calling him home. I thought it was the sleepscape taking its toll on him, but… One day, he was there one minute and gone the next. Vanished in what I can only describe as a wave of darkness. Like a riptide.
“We couldn’t make sense of it. And then the same thing happened to Lia. I saw her running and crying to the voice she said was calling her home, and she vanished, taken by this strange tide just like Travers. I tried to follow her through that darkness, but it only took her. Only her.”
Romie’s voice came out thick with emotion. “A part of me hoped they did go home. That whatever purgatory this must be, it’d finally come to pass for them.”
“They did come back,” Emory said painfully. “But not… Romie, you can’t let Jordyn follow that voice. You can’t follow that voice.”
“Why? What happened?”
“We found them. Travers and Lia.”
“Alive?”
Emory shook her head. Devastation darkened Romie’s brown eyes, and Emory couldn’t bring herself to tell her the gruesome truth of their deaths. Didn’t want to give her a false sense of hope by telling her they’d been alive when they’d first washed up, even if it was just for a moment. They had to make sense of this before Romie or Jordyn tried to follow those voices and suffered the same fate.
But they also couldn’t stay here—that was clear enough. They needed a way out that wouldn’t get them killed.
Romie’s eyes narrowed onto a point over Emory’s shoulder. She stiffened. “Jordyn, what are you doing?”
“Jordyn?” Emory echoed, whipping around.
He was a dark shape down the path, his movements slow and uncoordinated, almost as if he were drunk. There was a gaunt, haunted look about him, and down the side of his face were three long, black gashes. He didn’t seem to hear Romie or see Emory as he leaned dangerously close to the edge of the path. Stars shied away from him and the gathering shadows beneath him.
A clawed hand materialized from the dark then, made of shadows itself. Slowly, it reached for Jordyn, whose own hand lifted in a mirroring gesture.
Romie tore toward him. “Jordyn, no!”
Those monstrous claws sank into Jordyn’s flesh. Cords of black sinews raced up his arm and neck and into his open mouth, and just as Romie reached him, darkness burst all around them. Emory thought she might have screamed, thought she heard Romie crying out to her, saying something that didn’t register, but all she knew then was chaos and cold and fear—
Emory stumbled back into waking.
She opened her eyes to another tenebrous space, to another Brysden shouting her name.
She was awake—but so was the stuff of nightmares.
The darkness had followed her. It expanded and twisted and stretched, looking to fill the cavern. A chilling breath blew through the Belly of the Beast, knocking over the lantern she’d left on the cave floor, leaving only the one in Baz’s hand, a weak beacon in the void.
There was silence. Neither of them dared to breathe or move, all too aware of the presence that loomed.
Baz saw it first, the shape that lengthened behind Emory out of the darkness. A slender thing of bone and shadow, humanoid in theory but stretched too long and too thin, with fathomless eyes and clawed hands tipped in black.
An umbra. Nightmare personified.