CHAPTER 33
Kessian’s mouth fell open, face wan with shock. “Marlowe! You’re sure?”
I wished I wasn’t. “I saw his face right before he went through the portal. It was him.”
“Oh, Tal …” Kessian’s thumb brushed at the dampness on my cheek. “Why would he do that?”
I could only guess based on the argument we witnessed in Grandad’s study.
“An old grudge? I don’t know.” The pocket watch ticked once, so loud I heard it from within Kessian’s pocket.
He retrieved it and flicked it open to check how much time we had left.
His face went paler than it already had been.
“Three hours have passed? Surely not, that felt like an hour at most.”
I checked the watch myself, but Kessian was right. The hour hand pointed to three o’clock.
Kessian swore. “What do we do now?”
Before I could answer, the world washed out, the colors dripping. With the rush of water in my ears, I felt myself swept away, the tide pulling me elsewhere and dumping me outside 37 Culpepper Avenue again.
Landing on my arse, I dusted myself off as I helped Kessian to his feet. He winced, the transition less gentle on his hip.
Beside us, the Keepers reappeared, inclining their head. “You have returned successfully from the first of many trials.”
“We found out who the poisoner is,” I said, pushing aside my feelings on the subject. “Now if you let us out of here—”
“You have found the poisoner, but not the nature of the poison or its antidote.”
I sagged. I’d hoped telling the authorities and bringing him to justice might be enough to soothe the strid, but of course it couldn’t be that simple.
A bone-deep exhaustion plagued me after the last memory, too fraught with feeling to fully process while still trapped in this alternate reality.
The thought of venturing into another didn’t thrill me.
“I have a question,” Kessian said. “What we’re doing, it can’t … rewrite history, can it?”
“In theory, but in practice this has never come to pass. History is written, and you will be its architects.”
“So you’re saying we don’t have a choice? Whatever happens is destined,” I said.
“Whatever happened. Not what happens now or later. Some choices you will make because you have already made them, because you are who you are and act in accordance with your nature. But the future is still flexible, not yet written. You have likely seen glimpses in dreams. Things which were so likely to happen that they might as well have been set in stone. But they are not. Those stones can still be moved. Or shattered.”
So the past was like a pot that had already seen the kiln, but the future? That was still a lump of clay waiting for the wheel.
“Where do we go next?” Kessian asked. “Or when should we go?”
An idea had already begun to form in my head as Kessian turned the watch over and over in his hand. An amalgamation of the one from our reality, and it brought up a question.
“Can we take things with us from these memories? As Keeper, Kessian can affect the environment, but can he steal pieces of it?”
The Keepers only inclined their head and gestured to Edwin Ashborne’s house, the door of which swung ajar, as if to say, “Why don’t you try?”
“What do you want to steal?” Kessian asked.
“Proof of what happened nine years ago. I think I know where we can find it. Or where we already have.”
Kessian followed me into the house, up the stairs to grandfather’s study. “Where?”
“Foxbury Manor.”
Kessian’s eyes lit up. “The stolen contract. You think that was us from the future?”
“What else explains its disappearance? Besides, if Warwick owns the flute, he could still have been involved. Marlowe might not have been working alone.”
It was also a memory I didn’t dread revisiting. I got the sense I would have to relive the worst horrors of my life to better understand this poison the Keepers spoke of, but I didn’t relish the thought.
Particularly not Laurelie’s death.
“All right. How do we get there?”
“These clocks of Grandad’s, particularly the labeled ones, have to have some significance, don’t they? Maybe we can use them to control the who and when of which memories we visit.”
Mine kept ticking. The other two didn’t, their hands frozen in time, perhaps a reflection of their time of death.
If we wound the clock back twenty-four hours, would we see the events of their last day alive?
It seemed an inefficient method. How many times would we have to wind the clock to show my memories from nine years ago?
“How did Edwin know how to use them if he never entered the Bloodstream before?” Kessian asked while rifling through papers on his desk.
“I think he used them to visit memories in his dreams. Like the ones we shared, though they were random. Controlled by the whims of the strid or your wild magic maybe?”
“Hm. Here.” Kessian held out a beaten-up notebook with a broken spine that fell open to a particular page.
“Could this be the formula?” He read aloud.
“Spin the hour hand to each number for the year, pausing for three seconds between each. Then turn the hour hand to the number corresponding with the month, minute hand to the day, second hand for the hour, which you tap twice for p.m.”
I followed his instructions, counting back to the day we’d visited Foxbury Manor. When I got to the hour—two in the afternoon—the by-now-familiar sensation of the world diluting around us washed out the study and replaced it with a conservatory.
Sitting on the settee before us, Warwick was serving me tea. As I reached for the sugar, he said, “That’s the salt. I prefer salty tea. Strange, I know,” and pushed across the second cup, removing the lid.
He’d put truth serum in it, I remembered.
What I hadn’t recalled was Kessian striding forward and slapping the sugar off the table. It shattered on the floor, the lid rolling off behind a plant pot, and my memory sharpened around the moment.
“He spiked it,” Kessian said. “Rotten bastard …”
I restrained him from knocking anything else over. “He’ll just have Lionel replace it anyway.”
“This is the one time I can punch him without any consequences.”
I looped both arms around his waist and started pulling him from the conservatory.
“The consequences would be failing to find that contract because we got sucked into a timeline paradox. Nobody got punched in that room. If the contract proves his involvement, he’ll get a steeper punishment than a punch to the face. ”
He stopped resisting me, grumbling, “It would feel very good to punch him in the face, though.”
“You really hate him, don’t you?”
Kessian grimaced. “He’s been raising my rent without giving me a pay raise at the spa for the past six years, and then he evicted me. He’s the most poisonous person in Shearwater. If the wraith had drowned him it would have fixed half the town’s problems.”
I paused in the foyer. We had to wait until my past self snuck upstairs to unlock the door. “Why do you say that?”
“Hm?”
“That’s just a very specific choice in words, ‘poisonous person.’ Did you mean it like that? That getting rid of him somehow could be the real antidote to this problem?”
“Yes … and no.” He frowned, walking past me to the display case with the wraith statue inside.
Now I’d made the connection, the antlers looked less like antlers than a musical instrument.
A strange one, yes, with so many tines, but where they all connected was clearly a mouthpiece, and the holes in each hollow tine would control the note. To have it flagrantly on display …
He wasn’t the one who’d used it, though. My uncle’s saliva could still be on the mouthpiece, his fingerprints on the tines.
“I keep coming back to this idea of home,” Kessian said. “When Shearwater chose me, it asked me what I wanted, and I told it I wanted a home. Now all Shearwater wants is to go home, too.”
“That still makes no sense to me. How can it? It’s a place.”
“Wild magic doesn’t come from the usual tithes witches use.
It comes from less tangible things. Things big as love and small as the feeling of putting your feet up after a hard day’s work.
I think some wild magic comes from feelings we don’t have names for anymore.
And I think Shearwater’s is like that. It …
it needs to be a home, and have a home, to make its magic. ”
I didn’t like how it made abstract sense. Abstract problems required subjective solutions. This wasn’t math, I couldn’t solve for “z” and come up with the same answer as the next person. “Well, that complicates things. Couldn’t have just been bitten by a snake and given an antivenom.”
Kessian’s lip quirked. He held up the watch, which had lost another hour.
On schedule, my past self speed-walked down the hall, turning sharply to go up the stairs. We followed close behind, watching him rendezvous with past Kessian and charm the lock open.
Courtesy of the sheer size of Foxbury Manor, it wasn’t difficult to follow them inside without bumping into anything. While they were busy unlocking and rifling through the filing cabinets, we focused on the safe.
“Do you remember the combination?” I asked.
“I thought you did.”
“You’re the one whose hand was guided through it.”
“Yes, I was quite distracted by the ghostly touch of my future self and neglected to write it down.”
“Well, we have to know what it is, or this wouldn’t have worked in the past.”
“Do you know Warwick’s birthday?”
I groaned. Our past selves were making their way around the room, getting closer to the side of the desk where the safe was visible.
Kessian tapped his finger against the pocket watch as he tried to recall. I sifted through the memories of the past few days, wondering if we’d ever come across a number combination. The trip to Coill Darragh, speaking to my grandfather’s ghost, the autopsy—the past week was a blur.
Our past selves noticed the safe and moved in.
Kessian backed up to give them space, tapping more rapidly. “Shit. It’s like they’re on the tip of my tongue.”
Or at the tip of his fingers. “Kessian. The watch. They were in the watch.”
He flicked it open, and there they were on the lid.
34-96-13
He smacked a kiss to my cheek. “You’re so smart and beautiful.”
Without preamble, he leaned awkwardly over his past self, guiding him by the hand to input the numbers, leaving me in the pleasant daze of being kissed and complimented so casually.
We hadn’t had the time to talk about the kiss at Fae’s wedding, or what should have come after.
With our lives on the line, our relationship wasn’t a priority, but the graze of Kessian’s lips reassured me that what he’d said hadn’t been a dream.
“You’re a story I’d want to see through to the end, even if I knew the ending was tragic.”
I fervently hoped it wouldn’t be.
The safe clicked open, the door swinging to reveal the sheafs of papers, including a contract conspicuously covered in runes and sigils.
The sound of Warwick’s encroaching familiar distracted our past selves, allowing us the opportunity to take the contract. If they’d been watching would they have seen it vanish into the ether? Or would their minds play a trick and insist it was never there to begin with?
Retreating with our prize, we huddled to read it, but the strid, sensing we’d got what we came for, began to pull us away from the memory. The pocket watch emitted an ominous TICK TOCK, the study blurred, and we tumbled out of the study, back into the Bloodstream.
Kessian rubbed his sore hip and glared up at the sky. “I miss beds and soft furnishings and blankets and hot water bottles and baths.” He appraised the time on the pocket watch and winced. “Another two hours gone. How is each memory stealing so much time?”
I didn’t know, but we didn’t have much to spare for sitting and poring over the contract. Kessian gave me half the stack of papers, mostly the ones covered in symbols he couldn’t read as a non-witch. It didn’t take long to derive a few conclusions.
“It’s a magical nondisclosure agreement attached to the temporary loan of the … the ‘bone flute.’ It says here, Marlowe had permission to use it for the specified time frame it was on loan, but under the condition that any adverse effects of its usage would be his sole responsibility.”
Kessian snorted. “Adverse effects? It lures people to their deaths. He aided and abetted a murderer.”
“Unless Marlowe didn’t know what the bone flute did. The contract makes no mention of its effects.” It was a paltry hope but felt easier to forgive than malice.
“Maybe.” Kessian didn’t sound convinced.
“Whatever his reasons, it still brings us no closer to identifying an antidote for the poison. The consequences of this contract hadn’t come to pass when it was drafted.”
“Keep it safe. We’ll need it to prove Marlowe’s involvement. For now, where do we go next?”
I dreaded the answer, but there were two mysteries as yet unsolved, and I couldn’t conceive of how we’d identify the cure for the poison unless we explored the symptoms.
Unfortunately, the symptoms all seemed to involve the deaths of my family members.
“I think we have to go back to the day my grandad died.”