Beside him was a boy with umber skin, his throat bared to the moonless sky as he roared with laughter, and a girl with chin-length hair the color of flames, her painted lips curled up in amusement as she brought a bottle of sparkling wine to her mouth. Emory knew of them: Virgil Dade and Lizaveta Orlov. Along with Keiran, they were considered Aldryn’s elite, upperclassmen who had money and power written all over them, from the clothes on their backs to the way they held themselves. A certain aura hung over the three of them, as if they stood a world apart from the rest of the students gathered on the beach.
Virgil nudged Lizaveta as he noticed Emory watching them. Recognition shone on both their faces. Other people on the beach were staring at her now too. Look, it’s the girl who survived the Beast, someone said. What in the Deep is she doing back here?
Because that was all she was to them: a nameless curiosity, just the girl who’d made it out alive and was silly enough to come back.
She knew what Romie would have done in her place. She’d have spun this in her favor, held her head high and refused to be made a victim everyone tiptoed around and gossiped about. She would have walked right up to Keiran and his friends with that bold confidence of hers, said some witty comment or another, and everyone would have laughed and moved on.
Emory wasn’t Romie—something she’d been painfully aware of all her life—but she would need to be to get the answers she sought.
Keiran’s voice reached her before her forced bravado could slip. “Care to join us, Ainsleif?”
Her stomach tied itself into knots at the sound of her last name on his lips. It felt both strangely personal and othering. Keiran was smiling at her with a lazy tilt of his mouth, as if the waterlogged corpses strewn on the banks of this very cove were a distant, forgotten memory.
Emory couldn’t forget. The images were starkly imprinted on her mind: the loud clattering of her teeth, the echo of it running through her bones, the cold and the dread and the numbness in her soul. The odd way Serena Velan’s and Dania Azula’s limbs had been bent on the sand, Daphné Dioré’s unseeing eyes, and the bluish tint of Harlow Kerr’s lips. The spiral etched just below the palm of their upturned hands, the strange mark no longer a faint gleaming silver like her own but black—the lines of it smudging together like too much ink bleeding on paper.
She tried to push it all down. To breathe so she could get on with what she came here to do. She forced a bashful smile, kicking at the sand. “That’s okay. I don’t want to intrude.”
“Nonsense, you must join us,” Virgil said, earning a disbelieving stare from Lizaveta. He snatched the bottle from her hand. “Plenty of this to go around, and we’d love the company, truly. Isn’t that right, Lizaveta?”
They exchanged a loaded look until Lizaveta turned to Emory with a tight-lipped smile. “If the boys insist.”
“The more the merrier.” Virgil grinned.
Keiran watched Emory with a feigned nonchalance that crawled under her skin. Like he was testing her, waiting to see if she’d be dumb enough to say something about that night—about the mark they both had—in front of his friends.
Two could play this game, Emory thought. And if she had to drink and exchange pleasantries to get her answers, so be it.
She sat next to him on the sand, wiping her clammy hands on her corduroy pants. The bottle was passed around until her fingers curled around the neck of it, brushing Keiran’s as they did. His Full Moon tattoo reflected the firelight, a silvery disk with a stalk of white orchids curved around it, the opposite of the dark sigil on her own hand. Emory felt his eyes on her as she took a sip, acutely aware of the quiet intensity in them.
“I’m surprised to see you out here,” Keiran said conversationally. The words After what happened last spring hung unspoken in the air.
“I’m not,” Virgil chirped with a lopsided grin, giving Emory an appreciative once-over. “There’s a certain undeniably attractive quality to death and tragedy.” He swept a hand to the students on the beach, a few of which were still glancing at Emory. “We simply can’t keep away from it.”
Lizaveta rolled her eyes. “I think that’s just the Reaper in you talking, Virgil.”
Emory peered at the back of Virgil’s hand, where the sigil of House Waning Moon shone, a thin crescent curved around a deep purple poppy. Those who specialized in death magic had the most closely regulated tidal alignment outside of House Eclipse. But despite the grim nature of their power, it was far better regarded than any Eclipse magic ever was. Death, after all, was part of the holy cycle of life, something to be respected, revered—whereas Eclipse magics were deemed unnatural, something born beyond the perpetual cycle of the moon and tides.
Emory knew Reaper magic was rarely ever about death itself, but rather bringing an end to things. She supposed there was a certain beauty in that. Still, she couldn’t help the gooseflesh rising on her arms as Virgil’s dark eyes met hers from across the fire, and he said, “She’s a Healer. She gets it, this pull death has on us. I bet it’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
Behind him, Dovermere loomed like some ominous death god, thrumming a sinister heartbeat. He was right, in a sense. She’d needed to see it, this place that haunted her nightmares. It didn’t seem as threatening as she’d imagined it would, with the Aldersea sighing beneath a muted sky as sparks from the bonfires danced upward like homebound stars.
She swallowed past the lump in her throat and gave Virgil a sad smile. “I figured I’d need to face it eventually.”
Was that a glimmer of sympathy she caught in Keiran’s gaze? She could use that to her advantage, make him see her as this lost, broken thing he might take pity on if that got him talking.
She took another sip and handed Lizaveta the bottle, noting the crescent-and-hollyhock sigil of House Waxing Moon on the back of her hand. Emory couldn’t recall what her tidal alignment was.
“The girl who bested Dovermere,” Lizaveta mused. There was something almost grudging in her eyes as she sized Emory up. “You must be some Healer to have survived the Beast.”
Emory’s nails dug into her palms. The Belly of the Beast. It was what students called the very deepest cave within Dovermere, the point of no return. Its name was an apt one, for like any starved beast, it had jagged teeth and a habit of swallowing whole those who got too close; those who believed they could best it.
Virgil took the bottle from Lizaveta and tipped it toward Emory with a wink. “Ah, but what is death to a Healer, hmm?”
“Healers aren’t impervious to death, Virgil.” Lizaveta scowled. “No one is. Not even you Reapers.”
She was right, and no one was impervious to the dangers of Dovermere, either. To slip into the Beast and out before the sea could rise to trap them inside was no small feat. Tides were fickle things, and time itself tended to lose all meaning in the damp and gloom of Dovermere. It could slip away at a moment’s notice, and once the sea came rushing in, there was no way out but through. No way to vanquish the Beast but with magic and luck.
Emory was blessed to have had both on her side that night. With the new moon reigning the sky, her magic had been at its peak, same as it had been for Quince Travers and Serena Velan, the other two House New Moon students who’d been in the caves—one a Healer, the other a Darkbearer. The rest of them would have had to resort to bloodletting to access their abilities, given that their magic lay dormant in their blood until their own moon phase came around.
But the tide had not given them a chance to even try, death sweeping in too fast for any of them to react. Even Emory couldn’t remember reaching for her healing magic.
“One of the drowned students was a Healer too. Quince Travers.” Lizaveta’s gaze pierced Emory. “Did you know him?”
A shock of ginger hair, big eyes gawking at her as the tide came crashing in.
Emory shifted uncomfortably. “A little.”
They’d had nearly all their classes together, both being freshmen in the same lunar house, with the same tidal alignment. She’d never gotten to know him much outside of that, though. He’d been rather haughty, preferring to spend his time alone or with equally elitist upperclassmen.