“How could you do this?” She hated her voice for its brokenness.
“I did this for you, Ains, can’t you see? To be the Tides’ vessel… Think of all that power you’ll have coursing through you. The full might of the Tides in your veins. There’s nothing more sacred.”
Emory flinched away from his reaching hand. Hurt flashed in Keiran’s eyes. He was gilded in the glow of lanterns, ever the embodiment of his tidal alignment, even now. A light in the dark.
Except he was the darkness.
Emory’s fists uncurled at her sides. “Was any of it real?”
“Of course it was.”
And there was such fervor in those words, how could she not believe him?
Yet Lizaveta’s death-still body was at their feet and the others in their unnatural slumber around the Hourglass and there was no overlooking this, no way to spin this in his favor.
“I told you that you have a hold on me, and I meant it, Ains. This pull between us, this attraction… It’s undeniable.”
Emory drew back with a shake of her head. A wretched, rotten feeling twisted in her stomach, festered in her mouth. How easily she’d fallen under his spell. He’d known exactly what she wanted and had used it to his advantage—the same way she’d used Baz’s feelings for her to her own, she realized with a pang of guilt. She’d craved to be seen and desired by someone like Keiran, someone magnetic and gorgeous who made her feel so very important, so much so she’d ignored all the red flags, ignored the suspicions she’d had when she first started this.
“I knew you were special,” Keiran said. “And now you can be so much more.”
A vessel for the Tides.
“But my power won’t be my own,” Emory refuted. Nor would her will, her mind. “It’ll be the Tides pulling the strings.”
She’d be a weapon used to destroy every Eclipse-born for what a single one of them had done to his parents.
The remnants of the Shadow’s stain—that’s what he thought was in her blood. The reason she could access all the moon’s magics in some twisted, corrupt way. He thought her the Shadow reborn, the great eye that shadowed the world, the unhallowed force the Tides had sent to the Deep.
Tidethief.
Once, Emory might have thought the same of her magic: that it was corrupt, wrong. Hadn’t she hated it when she’d first discovered it? This burden she couldn’t understand, this thing that had taken Romie from her and might as well have killed Travers and Lia and Jordyn and the four others who’d succumbed to Dovermere.
But she had seen the beauty in her magic too. Dead plants becoming lush again under her touch. Sunflowers blooming in an illusioned field. A path laden with stars.
And Baz at the center of it all, the quiet wonder that had started to replace the fear he’d once regarded her with, because he saw it too, the splendor beneath. He could deny his own power all he wanted, fear the Eclipse and the Collapsing and the destruction it could so easily wreak, but deep down, he had to know their magic had a place in the world. That it wasn’t twisted or wrong or unhallowed, but magnificent and worthy of belonging.
Through her hand, the Tides would eradicate all that beauty, all those born under an eclipse, and Emory would be powerless to stop them.
She squared her chin. “I won’t do it.”
A shadow fell over Keiran’s face. There was nothing of the Lightkeeper now in his features, nothing of his dimpled smile and easy manner.
“You will,” Keiran said, voice low. “You’ll unlock this door to the Deep, and you and I will walk through it together.”
All this time, he’d made her feel important, significant, something Emory had always thought she was lacking. She’d wanted so badly to be someone worthy, someone who was more than just mediocre. Someone powerful.
But not like this. Not at the cost of losing herself in the process, of having her identity stripped away in the name of some greater, terrible power.
The words she’d thought to say to him last night were still lodged in her throat where she’d kept them safe. They threatened to choke her now, and she was glad she hadn’t spoken them. They were the only piece of her Keiran hadn’t gotten, and she would rather suffocate than share them now.
“I’m not opening anything for you.”
Emory reached for her magic, calling to her the darkness that lived at the edge of the lanterns’ light. Fury swept over Keiran. He stepped toward her, and she could feel the Glamour magic readying on his tongue as he opened his mouth to command her once more, bend her to his will.
Cold swept through the Belly of the Beast before he could utter a word, a dark breeze that made the hairs on the back of Emory’s neck rise.
It was the coldness of stars, of the deepest ocean.
The chill of despair.
The hostility of fear.
Keiran whirled just as the umbra erupted from the darkness behind him, nightmare given form. It swept for him with its claws of elongated shadows, but Keiran was faster than it, shielding himself with a cocoon of shimmering light pulled from the lanterns. The umbra that once was Jordyn let out a bone-chilling sound that reverberated in the cavern.
Emory didn’t think twice about what she did next: she wrested the protective light from Keiran’s grasp, wrapped it around herself instead, and when the umbra lunged for him again, it found its mark.
Keiran screamed, falling to the floor. The umbra bent over his cowering form, and perhaps there was a piece of Jordyn left in those fathomless eyes after all, seeking revenge on the person who’d no doubt filled his ears with promises of greatness and power.
Jordyn, Lia, Travers, Romie, all the Selenics lying around the Hourglass… Lizaveta… They’d been as much pawns in Keiran’s scheme as Emory had been. There to open a door for him to take what was not his, their lives significant only in the way they’d been used on this sacrificial altar of power.
She watched numbly as the umbra feasted on Keiran’s fears. She couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty over the whiteness of his face, the horror in his eyes. He’d meant to use her. Erase her. Destroy everyone like her—all in some sick, twisted attempt to save her from this corruption he saw her magic as.
Keiran went limp as the umbra at last turned away from him. Its depthless eyes swept over Lizaveta. Her red hair was matted with blood as it pooled around her, her eyes turned unseeing to the Hourglass. She was dead, not a fear or nightmare left to plague her, but next to her…
With a piercing shriek, the umbra moved toward the sleeping forms around the Hourglass, as if in anticipation of the new nightmares it might feast upon.
Emory couldn’t stand still, not for this.
She sent her light flying to the prone Selenics, but the thin cocoon that wrapped around them was too flimsy a barrier for the umbra. It clawed at Virgil first, hovering over him as it gorged itself on the Reaper’s fears. Emory remembered all too vividly how it had felt to have the umbra draw upon her own fears, how she’d tried to defeat it with every ounce of magic she had, only to have it nearly ruin her. Silver veins aglow under her skin, the Collapsing eager to consume her.
Baz wasn’t here to stop her from Collapsing this time. But if light and hope and dreams couldn’t kill the nightmare, perhaps the answer lay in the beast itself. In something that was just as frightening.
What could kill fear if not fear itself?
What could end a nightmare if not something more frightening still?
A distant part of her hesitated; this had been a person, after all, someone she’d known. But there was nothing of Jordyn left. Virgil had once told her it would have been a kindness for her to kill Travers. That death, if given, could be a mercy.
She had no choice.
Her own fears were so close to the surface, they were easy to call on. Romie going through a door she could not survive. Travers and Lia and Jordyn dead at her command, whether she willed it or not. The thought of Keiran using her against her own kind and the Tides erasing everything she was and who she wanted to be.