CHAPTER 37
The memory spat us out onto the banks of the Bloodstream once more. I stared up at the weblike pattern of watery reflections in place of a sky, trying to summon the strength to move, but the last revelation was one too many.
Where did I go from here? I knew who the wraith was, I knew who the murderer was, and yet I was no closer to cleansing the strid.
“Tal?”
Kessian’s face appeared in my vision. This time, he didn’t ask if I was okay. His hand hovered like he was searching for which hurts needed soothing most. In the end it laced with mine.
“Tal, we have to go. We don’t have much time.” He flipped open the watch, wincing. “One hour.”
“Where do we go? I don’t have any more dead family members to investigate.”
“I think we need to try and talk with Laurelie.”
“She’s not Laurelie anymore. She tried to kill you. She took Amelia.”
Kessian rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. “She has a connection to you, though. If she’s still in there, you’re the only one who can reach her.”
“How?”
“Do you still have the talisman Marlowe gave you?”
“No. I left it in Lunaris.”
Kessian nodded thoughtfully. “That works.”
“It does?”
“If we go back to the day of the wedding, when everyone’s busy and the wraith is trapped in the shed, we could go to Lunaris nearby, get the talisman, and see if we can use it to reach Laurelie.
It’s connected to her death, so it stands to reason it could have the power to bring her back to … herself.”
To life. That was the hope neither of us dared speak aloud.
Amelia had come back, but she’d only been gone a day.
Still … We returned to the wall of clocks in Grandad’s study, to mine, and input the date and time of the wedding.
When the world melted away, it dropped us into the pavilion by the spring, where the me of twelve hours ago arranged chairs for the ceremony.
Kessian and I wasted no time in crossing the grass, weaving past the gardens and trees to the place Lunaris was parked. My fingers touched the door handle, and she unlocked for me, as aware of my presence as if I were flesh and blood, not a spirit whisked to her through the stream of time.
Her curtains fluttered in greeting. I wished I could hug her.
“Missed you too.”
I went to the bedroom and cast around the bedside cabinet and drawer for the talisman. I’d last used it to banish the wraith when it had snuck up on Kessian in his sleep. It had fallen on the floor, where it had come loose from the earring fastener it had been attached to.
I emerged from the bedroom, holding it up. “I’ve got it. Let’s go.”
“One second. Look at this.”
I didn’t think we had a second, but Kessian showed me the spectral pocket watch. It seemed to have frozen, but after a long moment of watching, the second hand ticked forward once more.
“Remember when the pantry sort of … transformed to give me a seat?” Kessian said. “Familiars are creatures of wild magic. Do you think she managed to … I don’t know, follow us into the time stream to slow things down?”
At the time, I had thought I’d felt her comforting presence, but chalked it up to my emotions and the dream-like atmosphere of the Bloodstream playing tricks on me.
But time in the real world did pass more slowly, so if she could have a foot in either one, Kessian’s explanation was plausible.
I leaned briefly against the wall, gratitude for the both of them briefly overwhelming me.
Kessian, who presented me with solutions when I was too exhausted to see another way besides the one that had always worked: running away.
Lunaris, who’d remained the most steadfast friend over the course of a long, lonely road.
We still had to leave to confront the wraith and speak to Laurelie, but the security of having a contingency offered some relief.
Coin in hand, we went out to the shed with the faint blue glow creeping under its door. We unlocked and opened it, taking a few quick steps back.
The wraith waited within, its hunched form twisted up in the sigil. It registered us, uncoiling but calm. Recalling the ferocity with which it had thrown itself at the prison when we’d shown my family, I wondered if that had been a reaction to Marlowe.
“Laurelie?” I said.
The smoke rippled, a low growl making the timber of the shed shake.
I held up the coin. It felt a bit like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The wraith swayed, watching the coin owlishly, the smoke around it roiling with more fervor.
“Laurelie, if you’re in there, please hear me. It’s Tal.”
The shadows blazed against the sigil, the wraith’s figure contorting, and in the flicker of darkness around its face, I thought I saw that hazel eye again. The same color as mine.
A frisson of static and magic issued from Kessian. “Keep talking. I’m going to try something.”
He took a step toward it. Fear crept into my voice, but I did as he said and kept talking. I called Laurelie’s name, asked if she could hear me, squeezed the coin in my hand.
The shadows boiled like water. Kessian reached into them and tried to part them like a curtain. He’d breached the perimeter of the sigil. I stumbled over my words, torn between demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing and keeping the wraith’s attention on me.
“Try to remember me, Laurelie. I’m your brother.”
Kessian’s presence seemed to soothe the darkness, not agitate it. The fumes of the wraith’s body moved more languidly as Kessian’s fingers dragged through the shadows, carving through them, until a face emerged and cried out over the rattling breaths of the wraith.
“Help me!”
A hand burst from the wraith’s chest, fingers grasping and webbed in dark ooze. With the coin between our palms, I clasped that hand and pulled.
An elbow jutted out. Then a shoulder. A second hand pried its way out of the wraith’s rib cage until finally Laurelie’s face emerged, retching up black water.
I braced a foot against the doorframe like I had with Amelia, pulled as hard as I could, but the wraith let out a low wail of warning, and Laurelie was nearly swallowed again. Her throat was a lattice of dark veins.
The wraith wasn’t going to let her go. It’s a part of you.
Between choking gasps, she said, “Lunaris. Lunaris can—”
Shadows throttled her into silence, but I grasped her intent as several things I hadn’t understood slotted together like shards of a broken pot.
“Kessian. Get back to Lunaris.”
“What?”
“Go to Lunaris, open the door, and get inside. I have an idea.”
“Are you sure you want me to leave you with her?”
Reluctantly, I let go of my sister and took two steps back. “Please trust me on this.”
Kessian swore as he dropped his hands, releasing the wraith from the magic that bonded Keeper and strid. The shadows grew, brewing like storm clouds, swallowing Laurelie once more.
“Go,” I said.
Kessian gave me one worried look, then made his way back to Lunaris as swiftly as his legs and cane could carry him. Lunaris held her door wide for him. He climbed up and turned around, watching me anxiously.
I’d thought whoever had freed the wraith during the wedding had done it to sabotage us, but I’d been wrong.
With the toe of my shoe, I smeared through the lines of the sigil on the floor. The light of the prison died.
I had to turn my back on it to sprint for Lunaris. I could hear the grass and sod tearing up under its feet as the wraith pursued. The music from the wedding played the slow song Kessian and I had danced to while I fled for my life.
Kessian waited in Lunaris’s doorway. He held out a hand to pull me through faster. I grasped it, plunging past the threshold and whirling to see if it had worked.
The wraith was right there, reared up in the doorway. It seemed frozen on the other side, but if I watched closely, I could see the very slow, soft ripples of movement in its shadows, the infinitesimal descent of its claws.
Within Lunaris, time moved slowly. If I stepped back out, the wraith could dismember me in a second.
Careful to keep my body within Lunaris’s threshold, I reached into the wraith’s chest cavity. I still held the coin and felt something stir within. Laurelie’s spirit answering the call of a familiar relic.
“Come on, Laurelie,” I whispered.
Using my fingers like spades, I dug into the shadows and peeled them back.
Where before, they moved and undulated like oil, too slippery to grasp and constantly re-forming, now they felt more like mud and soil.
I dragged the shadows clear from one section of Laurelie’s face, revealing a cheek smudged with dirt, a closed eye, her mouth.
Kessian exerted his own influence, calming the wraith, making it complacent.
I unearthed Laurelie to the shoulders, her arms, her hands—the fingernails black underneath.
Her eyes fluttered open as I pulled her through Lunaris’s doorway. “Tal?”
As I clawed away the shadows trapping her elbow, she writhed and managed to pull that hand free. “That’s it,” she gasped.
With a heave, the rest of her pulled free, and we collapsed backward into the kitchen. The shadows fell away from her.
Most of them.
Everywhere her skin showed, dark veins wormed through her. Her hands and feet looked charred, her hair stained and still dripping. She appeared the same age she’d been on the day she died, still wearing her pajamas, but nine years as the wraith had taken its toll.
“I don’t have much time,” she said.