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—and then Tess cleared her throat and sidled away, dropping my hands.
It kind of felt like slamming a book closed in my face. Bam! No kiss for you.
“Right,” I said, unable not to clear my throat, too. I was disappointed but not offended, though it still smarted. “Association with me equals no association with your acceptance into Dawnhaven.”
As if I had yelled accusingly, Tess jerked to her feet and hurried toward the cabin. “We should keep looking for clues.”
I didn’t immediately follow. Knotting my fingers in my hair and actively stopping myself from ripping chunks out seemed like a better option than chasing after her.
Stupid! I snapped at myself. Why did you do that? You can’t like her! It only complicates things. You’re just getting in the way of her destiny. So what if you can’t call her your friend? Her dream is more important than your teenage boy feelings.
I turned my hearing to the cabin. Inside its wall, Tess was pacing the floor, muttering under her breath in frustration. I couldn’t make out any words, but I knew she was admonishing herself just as much as I was to myself.
Does she...actually like me?
The thought bolstered my hopelessness a bit.
Well, she doesn’t hate me. Is that the same thing?
“Shut up,” I hissed, getting up. The sun was beginning to set, filtering in from the right instead of up above. It would be night soon, and we could only hope it wasn’t home to any kind of person-eating predator. “Don’t be selfish, Bastian Hayes.”
I stopped short. Hayes was just a made-up name. What was I supposed to call myself then? Bastian Kaladin?
No way. Absolutely not.
“I’d rather get my fangs shaved down than anyone call me that,” I mumbled. “What about... Bastian... Whisler?” I glanced at my triangle tattoo, but it didn’t glow. Did I not say it loud enough? “Whisler.” It shimmered like usual, but for some reason, I felt the need to say it again.
“Bastian Whisler, son of Maer Whisler.”
The light that flared from the imbricatis was completely blinding. I shouted as the blast burned my eyes as if the sun itself was glaring at me just a foot away.
“Bas?”
I blinked away the spots dancing across my vision as Tess came running, her fingertips glowing with a prepared spell. But when she saw there was no one around, it faded. “What happened?”
I scrubbed at my eyes. “Well, we can definitely say I’m the key to the spellbook.” I recounted what had just occurred.
Her lips parted in surprise, and then curved in a soft smile. “You’re keeping her memory alive by acknowledging her as your kin.”
Maer died, but I lived. I was her legacy. I was the only thing that remained of Maer Whisler’s existence.
Then Tess became all business. “Did it give you any sort of vision? A view of where the spellbook could be or who stole it?”
I shook my head. “I was too busy being blinded.”
She hummed in frustration, but I knew it wasn’t directed at me. Some of it was directed at herself, taking the blame for losing the spellbook in the first place. Most of it was at everything else outside of our control, including the adults we trusted most who would never give us straight answers to anything.
Wanting to test Tess’s tolerance to my touch, I rested my hand on her shoulder. To my immense relief, she didn’t shrug me off. “Let’s get some rest. We earned it.”
“You’re right.” She sighed. “We’ll need it for what’s to come.”
What that exactly entailed, neither of us knew.
We returned to the cabin and warded the door and windows so heavily that we were sure we didn’t have to take watch in case there were any predators lurking in the shadows We nibbled and sipped on our provisions and settled down to sleep—all in companionable silence despite the awkward break-up earlier. I offered to take the floor while Tess took the couch. Night happily curled up in the space between us, purring.
The sound of their breathing quickly lulled me to sleep. I was so bone-tired that I passed out within seconds.
And that was how long it felt before I was awoken by shuffling feet.
I was on mine in an instant with my teeth bared to fend off whatever got through our defenses, but there was no one there. I scanned the room, Tess and Night still fast asleep. Nothing was out of place.
“If the cat didn’t get up,” I muttered to myself, “then it couldn’t have been a threat. Whatever it was, it just came and—” I stopped when my gaze fell on the table, where two books and a cross-shoulder bag were stacked beside the provisions basket—“gave us stuff. Tess!”
Tess jerked awake with a gasp, which startled Night. The cat yowled and flung herself three feet into the air. She hissed at Tess and wriggled under the couch to go back to sleep.
“What is—” Tess began before she saw the new objects. She swore under her breath and rushed over, pushing the two books beside each other. She skimmed her palm over the larger one. “A spellbook and...” She fanned open the smaller one. “Another diary. You read that. I’ll read the spells.”
Wanting to joke but deciding against it, I obeyed. I sniffed it first, hoping for a distinct scent of a person, but all the pages smelled like were, well, paper. Ancient, thin-as-air paper with ink splotches muddying some of the edge-to-edge writing.
“They must be from Aspen’s library,” Tess deduced, looking wild with her mused hair and excitement over a new book. “Maybe Koen, Sloan, Rhetta, or Emalyn could have dropped it off. But why didn’t they stay? Is this part of Piroska’s plan?”
There was hurt in her voice that I felt in my heart. Someone was guiding us, but why weren’t they showing themselves? If it was one of the adults, what was their reason behind leaving clues but no answers? I would be furious if it were all just some kind of teaching lesson.
“If they sent this stuff,” Tess said, “why didn’t they give us tokens?”
I explored the bag, but it didn’t have anyone’s scent and nothing was inside it. It could be used as a token, but without any indicators, it could just throw us in the thick of danger. No bigger of a risk than using Night’s cloak, though.
The diary—not the one from before, though still without a name anywhere—was full of ramblings about certain vampires, ancient cities, covens long gone or somehow still existing, phenomena around the world, basic witch spells, and a surprising amount of medicinal and healer knowledge. Whoever this belonged to, they were well-traveled and interested in the human body and mind. A great majority of things made absolutely no sense to me. But whoever sent it must have known it would help us somehow.
I followed Tess to the couch while she mumbled unfamiliar words and riddled out spells but didn’t cast any. My eyes scanned each page with superhuman speed until they stopped at the top of a page that read Vampire Abilities.
Excitement and hope went through me like a strike of lightning. Someone made a list? I flipped page after page over, my hope growing stronger with each rustle. Twenty pages of abilities and their descriptions! Was my dream power in here?
I searched frantically until I saw the magic words: Dream Memory.
“It’s an innate ability,” I read as quietly and swiftly as Tess, “but it can be trained to...”
There was an inspiring amount of detail on it—how common it was to inherit at birth, what it meant in basics, what it meant in specifics, and how to train it to be an active ability instead of a passive one. That excited me the most. Right now, the dreams controlled themselves—when they appeared, what memories they showed—and I needed to learn to control them.
“This is incredible, Bas,” Tess said in awe, bringing her knees up. “Look, a spell that—Well, I’ve never seen you this excited. What did you find?”
I was fully aware that our legs and shoulders were brushing, but this discovery was so profound that I thought nothing of it. “This describes over a dozen vampire abilities! Mine is in here! And Ciel’s and what I think Piroska’s is—”
Tess sucked in a breath and responded, but I accidentally tuned her out as I delved into the text again. A few moments later, she flicked my temple.
“Hey! Oh, sorry. Did you say something?”
“Yes,” she said in exasperation. “I said we can use this to find weaknesses of those abilities to our advantage.”
“Right.”
Tess observed my hesitance and guessed why as if she had read my mind. “You just want to learn about yourself.”
I nodded, stopping reading to look at her. “It hasn’t even been three months since my dream power returned after Galen’s spell on it faded, but I can’t count how many dream-memories I’ve had since then. They’re so vivid, and they connect me to important people. This ability is vital to who I am, yet I know nothing about it. This diary, whoever it belongs to, whether they’re dead or alive, explains everything I need to know, and... And I want to be selfish just once. I want to forget about Amate and the coven leaders and the war and everything... Just so I could be introspective for a while.”
Tess pursed her lips sympathetically. “I understand,” she said softly. “I wish that for you, too. Bas, I...” She trailed off as her eyes searched my face, seeming to forget her train of thought. Quiet settled between us once more. Then she cleared her throat loudly and leaned away though we kept our legs touching. “Well! Yes. Um. Unfortunately, we can’t be selfish right now. As soon as we stop all the evil plots going on, we can be as self-indulgent as we want. Is there anything about the eclipse in that diary? There are some quick, useful spells we can teach ourselves in this spellbook.”
Disappointed but not offended again, I pushed aside my selfish wants to continue past the list of abilities. We retreated back into our new studies, trying to forget the embarrassment we kept bringing on ourselves as we cataloged as much information as possible to use against the coven leaders.
Most of the writings were useless to our cause, and so after a few pages, I started skipping passages, but then—
Then I came across the word that seemed glaringly different than every other.
Eclipse.
“Found it!” I exclaimed, spreading the diary out on my knees so Tess could lean forward and read a portion,
“‘The moon covers the sun for ten counts of sixty, turning day into night.’ That’s what the other diary said! And there are dates listed... Wow... There have been so many over the years. They go back hundreds of years! Look, all the way back to... Oh, no.”
“What?” I asked worriedly, not catching onto Tess’s realization that made the blood drain from her face.
“The next eclipse that Agana is going to use to kill Amate and reclaim Sanlow...” Tess’s voice dropped to a terrified whisper. “It’s is two days.”
Dread sank like a stone in my gut. “How do you know?”
“That’s when this month’s full moon is out. And there is a pattern from these dates. They happen in the middle of summer every fifty years. Agana and Aeros were in a rush—they were on a time crunch to fulfill their plans.”
“Then why didn’t they try to capture us right away?” I wondered. “Those witches just stood and watched us instead of trying to bring us back to the carriages.”
Tess bit her lip in deep thought. “Do you think they waited until nightfall and went after Amate?”
“Probably not. They wouldn’t risk going just themselves against Amate, especially if she had her army with her. They either went to their contact or back to that house.”
“You’re right. We can’t predict anything.” Tess set her jaw in determination. “We need to get this information to the Kairos. But how? We don’t have tokens. I can keep searching in this book...”
I turned the diary pages back to the one with the dream-memory description. It is an innate ability, but it can be trained to initiate on-command.
“I think I know a way,” I told her slowly, “but you can’t be mad.”
