Emory couldn’t see the invisible shadows that plagued him, but she felt it, the way the umbra feasted on Baz’s fears. She saw it in the tears that lined his eyes, and when his limbs stilled, the fight waning from him, Emory uttered a desperate cry.
She drew herself up, soaked and dripping and fearless as she opened her senses wide. She reached for whatever remnants of light she could grasp, reached for darkness and death and life and protection, for the illusion of hope and dreams and fears, anything to fend off the very real nightmare before her. The thing that was trying to devour Baz, snuff out his light and make him into a shade of what he was.
Emory wouldn’t let it. She couldn’t let the umbra destroy the boy in the field, the boy she’d looked up at the stars with, the boy who’d helped her time and again despite the crushing weight of a thousand fears.
He had saved her; she owed him the same kind of courage in return.
She screamed as magic rushed through her, blinding, searing. It tore at her, silver in her veins, blood that sang, a great crashing in her ears as it sought to burst forth.
Her power was a tidal wave unleashed. And though Emory knew it might be the end of her, she let it consume her.
32 BAZ
BAZ SUSPECTED EMORY’S POWER WAS close to slipping past that invisible line. Her skin rippled with strange light, like moonlight over water, her veins shining silver just beneath the surface, pulsing brighter and brighter. A star on the verge of implosion.
The Collapsing readying its fateful blow.
And even with the umbra’s claws around his throat and fear like he’d never known seeping through him, all Baz could think of was her. The pain of knowing she would become like his father, like Kai, her magic eclipsing everything she had once been. The girl who made dead things grow back, who made sunflowers bloom in an illusioned field, who made facing his fears a little more bearable than it had been before.
Baz tried to reach for his magic, this thing singing to him just past the cold, dreadful terror wresting for control. A beam of blinding light burst from Emory’s chest. It shot toward the monster holding Baz in its grasp, made it shriek, shrink back in pain. Fear dug its claws out from him, and Baz slumped onto the rock below, head spinning as silver flooded his vision.
Emory cried out in pain as another beam of light shot from her. There was a crack, a sound that ripped through the world as a piece of the cave ceiling came loose.
And suddenly, Baz was back in the printing press, with his father’s arms wrapped around him and machinery raining down on them as the blast of his Collapsing razed everything it touched.
His worst fear reenacted. His darkest memory replicated.
He couldn’t let this happen again. Not to her.
Baz pulled on all the threads around him.
The rock froze midair. The umbra stilled, stumbled back, disappeared into the motionless water. The silver light around Emory receded as Baz wound back the figurative clock that sent her Collapsing back to a time it had not yet happened. And this was so much bigger than the death magic she’d wielded on another new moon night, when he had stopped that, too. And he was so very far past that line between small magic and big magic, but still he trudged on deeper and deeper, watching as the silver in her veins dulled, then darkened to blues and reds and purples.
She was a dying star in reverse, until at last, there was just Emory. No longer shining with ethereal light, but shaking with the impossible weight of what was and then was not.
“You’re okay,” Baz rasped. “Everything’s all right.”
He had done that. He had stopped her Collapsing.
Emory sagged against him. “Thank you.”
Baz wrapped his arm around her, his cheek pressed against her wet hair, and realized he would do it all again in a heartbeat.
* * *
The sea heaved the two of them onto the beach, boneless and utterly spent.
They’d gone into the caves at the lowest point of the noonday tide and emerged just before it reached its peak. An entire afternoon had somehow passed in the blink of an eye, though it felt, peculiarly, like it had spanned a lifetime.
Baz’s ears still rang with the echo of monstrous shrieks and falling rock, and all he could see were Emory’s silver veins and that blast of power that almost tore the cliff down on them. He watched the rapid rise and fall of her chest now as she lay sprawled on her back with her head turned to the horizon. Her veins were a normal color under her skin.
They’d wordlessly dragged each other out of the caves before the umbra could return. The incoming tide hadn’t been so bad after all, half-hearted waves battering against the cliffside. The shoreline had been close enough to swim. The whole cliffside had seemed to shake when Baz released his hold on his magic. Rocks had fallen as time resumed, and as they swam for the shore, Baz felt the strange caress of Dovermere against his magic, pleading, Wait, don’t go.
He reached now for one of the wool blankets they’d left on the beach and wrapped it around Emory. Sunken eyes met his, and in them he saw everything that felt too big and impossible to say.
He’d saved her from Collapsing—had reversed it, this thing that was supposed to be inevitable, unconquerable. It should have eclipsed her entirely and left nothing but raw, destructive power in its wake, but here she still was, still her. Still safe.
Emory grabbed his hand, searching for signs of silver in his own veins. “Are you…”
“I’m fine.”
Unease filled the space between his lungs where the words had been lodged. He was absolutely, completely fine. There had been no bottom to his magic, no end in sight, nothing to warn him that he might have gone too far past that line, and so he was fine.
Too easy. It shouldn’t have been so easy to wield such magic. He should have Collapsed trying to prevent her from doing so herself.
Adrenaline coursed through him, made him dizzy with wonder. If he had enough control over his magic to stop other people’s Collapsings… it could change everything. Eclipse-born students might truly find sanctuary at Aldryn with him there to protect them.
It was such an impossible, ludicrous thought, something Baz would never have even let himself dream of before. It felt like the whole world was unfurling before him, rife with possibility.
Emory looked at him like she was thinking the same thing, like she was seeing him for all he could be if he finally shed his fears, and it was a rush all its own, to have her look at him in such a way. Their labored breaths fogged the air between them as they held each other’s gaze, the waves clamoring against the cliffside serving as a stark reminder of what they’d so narrowly escaped.
And suddenly they were wheezing with delirious laughter, the tension and horror and impossibility of it all coming to a crest. Emory leaned into him, and he wasn’t sure if her shaking was from laughter alone or cold and shock as well. His cheek pressed against her sopping hair, fingers numb as he gripped the blanket around her. She tilted her face up to his, so close they breathed each other in. There was no laughter now, only stark reality, the warmth between them that proved they were still alive.
Nothing is out of your reach.
For once, Baz didn’t think.
Before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed her face between his hands and kissed her.
His mind went blank at the sea-salt taste of her lips. Emory hesitated for the briefest, most terrifying second before her mouth moved against his, soft and warm and inviting in a way he hadn’t known he’d craved until just now. A small sound rumbled at the back of his throat as she deepened the kiss. But then she was pulling away, holding him at arm’s length.
Baz blinked incomprehensibly. Emory was frowning down at her hand, where the sacred spiral glowed silver on her wrist. For a terrible moment, he thought she might have Collapsed after all. He reached for her arm, fear coating his mouth.
“Emory…”
She had a faraway look in her eye, as if she saw something he could not.
“What happened?” she breathed.
A sick, sinking feeling tugged on Baz. “I’m sorry, I thought—”
“Keiran, what are you talking about?”