“Wait, no, you can’t let go of the—”
Baz gasped as sudden warmth enveloped him. It started in his hand, where his fingers were laced through hers. His skin glowed, as if his entire body was suffused with light, like a protective second skin. He blinked at Emory, who was shining just like him. The beam at the end of her other hand intensified, a bright sunburst that swelled and pulsed.
“Now!”
She released the light. It blasted the umbra back, and Emory shoved at Baz, shouting at him to run as the umbra let out a deafening shriek.
They hurried toward the frozen wave. Baz barely had time to take a deep breath before plunging into its ice-cold depths. Emory was instantly at his side, and together they moved through the odd, gravity-less water like brightly burning stars making their way across the dark recesses of the sky, at once eternally slow and impossibly quick.
His pulse beat too rapidly, like the needle of a watch out of sorts, jumping from one line to the next in erratic motions. Before long, his lungs screamed at him, his body rebelling against him, desperate for air.
This is it, Baz thought. He would die in this time-still wave before he could emerge, and then time would speed up again and the tide would rush in with all the sea’s power at its back, and he and Emory would drown, and everything would be lost.
He broke the surface.
Baz breathed in a painful gasp of air, clawing at the wet floor of the half-submerged tunnel. Emory helped pull him up, and together they fell to their hands and knees, both of them still glowing in that protective light. They were in an odd bubble of waterless space created by the curve of the immobile wave. The distant sound of crashing waves reached them, strangely muffled in the quiet, and for a horrible moment, Baz thought he’d lost his grip on time. But the hands of his watch were still frozen, the water around them still motionless.
“The sea,” Emory gasped out. “We have to be close to the exit.”
That was what they heard: the rising tide battering against the cliffside, the outside world unaffected by Baz’s magic. If they made it out of here unscathed, those deadly waves would no doubt make quick work of them.
You could stop time for them, too, his magic whispered in his ear. A single wave, an entire ocean, the world itself. Nothing is out of your reach.
There was little comfort in the thought.
“We can make it,” Emory said. “We just have to—”
The umbra emerged from the time-still wave at their backs. Darkness filled the space around them, and Emory screamed as it sank its claws into her side despite the light still wrapped around her.
The umbra dragged her toward the watery depths.
“No!” Baz lunged for her, wet fingers slipping against hers.
Emory’s eyes widened with unspeakable fear, mouth open on a soundless scream.
The light around her flickered out.
And then she was gone.
31 EMORY
THE STRANGE, STILL WATER MUFFLED Emory’s scream. Bubbles rose and remained suspended around her in the dark as she fought against the umbra’s hold—against Jordyn’s hold.
Cold seeped into her even as a great fire raged in her lungs, and memories of another tide of nightmares rushed in: a voice in the deep, four bodies on a beach, Travers’s emaciated face, and the scream that tore through Lia’s throat and burned it to a crisp.
Fears and nightmares, crushed dreams and dwindling hopes—the umbra feasted on all of it, delighted in her pain. The sorrow she’d felt as a child every time ships sailed past, taking the idea of her mother further away from her. The sting of Penelope’s words as she accused her of not caring. The spark in Baz’s eyes when he looked at her, full of soft yearning she feared she might never quite reciprocate—or worse, that perhaps she did, or was beginning to, and it might break everything between them, this rekindled friendship that was becoming so dear to her.
The umbra wasn’t afraid of her here in the dark. The light was gone, and soon her life would follow. Water was already filling her lungs.
She’d been so close, Romie and Jordyn just within reach for one blissful moment before the umbrae erupted from the darkness beyond stars and claimed Jordyn as their own.
The relief on his face… It was almost as if he’d wanted to become one of them.
It all came back to her now, as if pulled up to the surface of her mind by the umbra’s power. When Jordyn had emerged in his new form, unrecognizable save for that glimmer of humanness still in his black eyes, Romie had pushed Emory back, yelling at her to wake up, to get out. But Emory had only stared, frozen, at the monster that rose from the dark.
A person who’d become a shade. A Soultender robbed of a soul.
He wasn’t supposed to follow her back into the waking world.
She wasn’t sure how it happened. His wraithlike hands had wrapped around her throat, and then: the feeling of tumbling through stars, the cold of the cave and the hard rock beneath her and the sharp, acidic taste of fear in her mouth as the umbra emerged behind her. It shouldn’t have been possible—wasn’t a full moon—and a distant part of her wondered if she had unwittingly called on Romie’s Dreamer magic to take him out of the sleepscape.
But no… This was no mere illusion, and it did not dissolve to dust.
What once was Jordyn pulled on her now with the intent to destroy her. Her vision blurred. The sea would claim her at last, and this would have all been for nothing.
Emory, Emory.
There it was, the Beast calling her back to its depths and into death’s waiting arms.
She had cheated death, once, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember how.
Yes—life. She had walked hand in hand with it before. Its power had flowed through her veins, answered her call.
And didn’t all magics unlock at her touch?
Emory reached for the one that had always come to her the easiest, the magic that had shaped and saved her time and time again. It jolted through her like an electric current, lending strength enough to fight back against the umbra’s hold.
Heal, she thought, and it was so very eager to comply.
But she couldn’t heal away the water in her lungs, couldn’t create air she desperately needed, and there was no light to call upon here, no saving grace, no hope. Only this dread that filled every part of her. How had they managed to breathe underwater at the river? A distant part of her knew the answer, something about wards, magic she wasn’t skilled enough to call on, didn’t know how, because she was so damn mediocre.
Emory stopped fighting.
Let this nightmare drag me down where I belong, she thought.
But something else reached for her then, pulling her in the opposite direction. The tide, it seemed, wanted a piece of her too.
Except the tide had hands. A face. It yanked her out of the water, gifting her a second life. Or perhaps, more accurately, a third.
Emory fell back against the rock, fighting for every breath. Baz’s soaked figure bent over her. She clung to him desperately, not quite believing it was him, unable to grasp that she was still here, alive, with him at her side.
“I’ve got you,” he breathed. His shaking hands smoothed back wet hair from her face, eyes wild behind his skewed glasses. “I’ve got you.”
She wanted to break down in his arms, but the nightmare wasn’t over. The umbra emerged from the water again, towering over them. Tendrils of dark water wrapped around its elongated limbs as an angry shriek wrenched free of its throat. Cold frosted the frozen wave, and before either of them could move, the umbra lunged.
It wrapped its claws around Baz’s throat, as if in retribution for taking Emory away. Baz’s legs kicked wildly as the umbra lifted him from the ground, his hands searching for purchase, trying to escape the umbra’s hold.