“Like hell I am.”
Keiran jerked his chin to the prone Selenics. “If you care so much about them that you were willing to risk our plan with that shit you pulled with Penelope, then save one of them. We have one offering too many. Both Ife and Louis are of House New Moon, but we only need one to take Bruma’s place in the Deep.”
The sacrifices—there were five bodies on the ground, but he only needed four. One of each lunar house. One for each Tide. Virgil for Quies. Javier for Aestas. Nisha for Anima. And either Ife or Louis for Bruma.
“I’m sorry, Liza,” Keiran lamented. “This is the way it has to be. So have your pick; save the one you want. Then leave before the tide comes.”
“You selfish bastard.”
Water sloshed at Lizaveta’s feet as she took a furious step toward him.
All of them paused, glancing at the cave floor. Water trickled into the Belly of the Beast from the passage they’d come through, a marker of the rising tide. The water reached all the way to the dais at the center. Where it touched the striated rock, it lifted from the ground in a thin tendril that wrapped around the Hourglass, mingling with the silver that ran along the rock. Around and around the stalagmite the ribbon of silvery water climbed, gathering in the middle of the column, where it formed a spiral to match the symbol on the rock.
That lock formed in the middle of the Hourglass again. Gooseflesh rose on Emory’s arms as she heard it: a melody calling her forward.
The door, readying itself to open in time with the tide.
There was urgency in Lizaveta’s voice now. Fear. “I’m not letting you go through that door without me.” Her fist closed around something at her side.
“Then I’m afraid this is where we part, Liza.”
Lizaveta lunged with a desperate scream, the gleam of a knife flashing as she swiped for Emory’s neck. Keiran stepped between them. He caught Lizaveta’s wrist, tried to wrench the knife free from her grasp.
“You can’t wake the Tides without your precious Tidecaller,” Lizaveta seethed, no match for Keiran’s strength as he pried her fingers open. “If I can’t have Farran back, you can—”
Lizaveta’s brows knit together in confusion, her red-painted mouth open on silenced words, as a trickle of blood fell from where Keiran had lodged the knife at the base of her neck.
36 BAZ
BAZ WOKE TO A WORLD of fog and stars.
Muffled voices sounded in his ears, at once very close and too far away. There was a dizzying pain on the back of his head. He tried to lift his arm to touch it and felt the cold bite of something against his skin, restricting the motion.
His hands were cuffed together.
Panic burst through the blur of unconsciousness. His surroundings came into sharp focus. He was in a small wood-paneled room, slumped against a bookshelf or an armoire that dug into his back. Weak light filtered in through a singular window on the opposite wall, where two people stood behind an antique mahogany desk. One of them was a man in a charcoal Regulator uniform; the other, a woman. Baz recognized neither of them. They didn’t notice he’d woken up, bickering in voices that still sounded odd to his ears.
He tried to focus on what they were saying—something about blood samples and order—and went rigid.
At his feet was a body.
Baz bit his tongue to keep from screaming. Kai’s face was pale, eyes closed in sleep or death; he couldn’t tell. He wanted to reach for him, shake him awake, will him to not be dead—but there. Kai’s chest rose and fell with faint breath. Not dead. Not yet.
It all came rushing back to him at once: the Institute, his father’s secret. The Regulators drawing silver blood from Kai—taking his slumbering power, his very life force, from him.
You weren’t supposed to see that.
Baz knew that honeyed voice, the way it dripped with thinly veiled condescension. With power. He’d only gotten a glimpse of chestnut hair before he was knocked out, but it was plenty for him to recognize Keiran Dunhall Thornby.
His gaze flickered to the Regulator and the woman across the room. He wondered how Keiran was involved in whatever screwed-up experiment this was—and where he had gone to now.
“Spare me the lecture, Vivianne,” the Regulator was saying. “Are you going to help me clean this mess or not?”
“Wiping their memory would be a lot easier if it were a waning moon,” the woman, Vivianne, bemoaned. “Calling on that much power through bloodletting is going to deplete me entirely.”
“Trust me, that won’t be a problem for much longer.”
Vivianne snorted. “Because Keiran is going to wake the Tides and return our magic to its former glory? Come now, Artem. You can’t be that foolish. Your dad went down this very road, and look where it led.”
Artem. Why did that name sound so familiar…?
“But we’ve got her, Viv. She’s the key that my dad and Keiran’s parents never found, the answer they never even knew they were looking for.”
Artem’s gaze cut across the room, and Baz quickly shut his eyes, pretending to be unconscious.
“The Tides will emerge from the depths of Dovermere and finally rid our shores of the stain of the Eclipse. They’ll give us back the power those Tidethieves stole from us.” Baz heard shuffling feet behind the desk, the clear clinking of glass. “After today, we won’t need to taint ourselves with their blood to know the full might of the Tides’ power anymore. Our magic will be free-flowing and true, as it once was.”
Baz’s pulse quickened as he recalled the silver blood they’d extracted from Kai.
They want our raw power, Theodore had said, and for that they need more of us to Collapse. They need us in here.
“The rest of the Council won’t be pleased you kept this from them,” Vivianne said.
“You’re wrong. The Council will praise us. The whole world will—”
The sudden blare of an alarm cut off his words. Shouts and footsteps echoed out the door.
Artem swore. “I need to go check on that.”
“I’m not staying here alone with two Eclipse-born,” Vivianne scoffed as if they were the scum of the earth.
“Then come with me and stay out of the way.”
“What about them?”
“They’re not going anywhere.”
Footsteps treading past him. A door opening. The click and switch of it locking from the outside.
Baz tensed, daring to crack open an eye. They were gone.
He took a proper look at the cuffs around his hands and realized with a sense of relief they weren’t the damper kind—just regular cuffs, locked too tight around his wrists. He fought against the haze still in his mind, tried to call on his magic, but it felt faint and far away. They’d likely given him some kind of sedative.
He crawled over to Kai, shaking him with his restrained hands.
“Kai.”
His eyes fluttered beneath their lids, but he remained lost to unconsciousness. Silver blood had dried in the crook of his arm, streaking from where a needle had been. And it was as if in that silver blood Baz could feel the sleeping magic inside Kai waning, like an ember about to flicker out and become nothing but ash. He looked around wildly for something to help, overwhelmed by this horrible feeling that if he let that ember of power die out, it would take Kai with it. His gaze landed on the desk, where a vial of something silver shimmered in the faint light.
Silver blood. Magic in its rawest form.
Baz could feel it coming off the vial: pure, undiluted power. The kind he’d sensed slumbering in Kai’s veins when he’d first visited him at the Institute, this vast power just beneath his skin that the Unhallowed Seal kept in check. The very seal that was supposed to keep the Shadow’s curse at bay, keep them from slipping into something dark and uncontrollable.
Raw power—was that truly what happened when one Collapsed? If any Eclipse-born could survive it like Baz and Jae apparently had—if they managed to escape the suppression of the seal…