CHAPTER 42
My limbs were corded and dripping ichor. The shadows licked around me like flames. I looked down at myself and did not recognize what I saw. I’d come into this prepared. If I was right about how everything ended, then I had to become this to make that ending happy.
But as I turned and beheld my reflection in the spring’s glossy pool, my stomach roiled.
That wasn’t me.
The strid echoed that sentiment in its own, susurrous language. I glimpsed images of the spring in its full power, when fireflies danced in the reeds and the water lit with glowing nebulas of magic. Blue, not crimson. Back when it had been loved, not used and abandoned.
Those feelings burrowed like termites in my mind. The strid eroded the barrier between us. Ate holes in my brain. Making us more and more alike, trying to make me forget.
But the sight of my reflection reminded me.
That wasn’t me.
That wasn’t my face.
Was this how Kessian once felt whenever he looked in the mirror?
Kessian.
That’s why I’d come here. That’s why I looked like this. I needed to purify the strid so Kessian and I could go home.
Home. You are home.
I resisted that thought. It wasn’t mine, either.
I needed to find my way back to the Bloodstream, back to the memory where we’d been separated.
Which of us had been separated? The strid from Laurelie? Me from Kessian? Both? My memories and the strid’s threatened to emulsify. I had to keep them separate. Oil and water.
The Bloodstream, I reminded myself. Kessian. I had to get back to Kessian.
Before, I’d needed to twist the hands of the clocks at 37 Culpepper Avenue to dip in and out of time, but as I tried to remember how, the strid pulled on my bones like a fell wind, dragging me another way, as though I’d slipped on an icy patch in my mind.
I found myself skidding—not toward Culpepper Avenue, but back into the waters of the spring.
I dove into the deep, into the mulch, the bedrock, squeezing through crevasses into the underground tributaries, the veins of the strid.
I could swim upstream against the current now, because I was the strid.
I had a map of the cartography and knew every turn, every tunnel.
I used it to slip between the cracks of this world into the Bloodstream.
It was like being plunged into a matrix of memories, none of them my own. Everything the strid knew and had borne witness to. All the things that hadn’t come to pass, but could. All the things currently happening.
(My mum is screaming on the phone to police while Camilla puts her arms around Fae, ushering them into the kitchen, where Amelia butters toast for them.)
These weren’t the memories I needed. There was a specific one.
The strid’s instincts and mine warred with each other.
It wanted to keep everyone here. I wanted to set Kessian free.
When one memory caught me like a riptide, I couldn’t tell whether it was the one I or the strid had aimed for until it dumped me into the conservatory at Foxbury Manor, where instead of making me tea, Warwick served a younger Uncle Marlowe, who held the bone flute in his hands with quiet awe and some suspicion.
“If it grants wishes like you claim, why haven’t you used it?”
“Who’s to say I haven’t already? Look at how I live. What more could I possibly wish for?”
Liar, trickster, murderer by proxy, hissed the strid, while I railed against it. This was the wrong place, the wrong time. I had already taken the contract from the safe, and there was nothing else to glean.
The memory threw me from its back like a bucking horse.
I landed back in the waters, both familiar and alien.
A part of me and not. It was difficult to remember why that was, or what I’d been doing here.
The water whispered stay, stay, stay, but I didn’t want to.
I resented the thing that kept me here, that had stolen something from me.
Someone.
Through the erosion of my self, I conjured Kessian’s face. The memories of him didn’t arrive fuzzily or in rapid bursts. They absorbed me, gluey and sticking to my heart.
Before I could narrow down the memory I needed to arrive in, the world resolved around me, and I was in a bedroom.
Two people slept on either side of the bed, with a gap between them of only a half foot, but it could have been a gulf.
Kessian was curled up on his side, facing Tal. Me, I tried to remind myself. That’s me.
Mine now.
Had that been my thought or the strid’s?
The possessive sentiment rotted through the already spongy barrier between us.
I found myself clambering through the fabric of the Bloodstream and the real world, slipping into the bed with Kessian.
A combination of missing him and muscle memory had me putting my arms around him, as the figure across the bed stiffened.
Me. That’s me, I reminded myself.
Kessian’s hair smelled like oranges, and he was so warm, and the water was so cold. I could take him right now. Take him into the Bloodstream so we’d never be apart.
Then Tal—I punched the wraith, which was also me. I fell back, screeching, and another part of me, a different part (Laurelie? Is that Laurelie?) saw her brother’s face and raised fists. She recoiled, and like a collared dog we were pulled back into the Bloodstream from whence we’d come.
Shearwater’s memories flooded me again, but this time I clung hard to the one of Kessian warm in my arms. That sensation still lingered through the cloak of shadows. I’d held him like that on the night I needed to get back to.
Please, take me there, to that time, to that place.
The world righted itself once more, countless memories becoming one.
I hovered like a ghost on the ceiling of Tal’s bedroom. My bedroom.
Relief clutched my heart in its fist. Kessian had just given me the glass of water with the dregs of a sleep draft in it.
I saw the magic sprinkle like sand in my eyes.
They drooped shut. I slumped into the pillow.
Kessian let out a soft noise of despair as he kissed my forehead for what he thought would be the last time and whispered, “Forgive me.”
Don’t go, I wanted to scream, but I consoled myself that I’d found the right memory. I’d come to the right time.
As Kessian wrote a note, Lunaris began to blare her horn. Kessian hissed at her to be quiet, but she slammed doors instead. He hurried to get dressed. He grabbed his cane and headed for the front door. She tried to lock him inside, but he slid a knife up the crack to unbolt the door.
He looked down the hall toward me. A tear glistened like a falling star amongst the freckles of his cheeks. It took visible effort for him to turn and go.
Lunaris redoubled her efforts to wake me. It would not be long now that she would.
Before we’d first met, he’d been a ghost who fished me out of a river and saved my life.
Now I crept from Lunaris’s roof into the woods and waited, a ghost hell-bent on saving him in return.
Moments later, my past self came racing out the front door. The sound of my own voice was always alien in videos and answering machine messages, but even more so now when I could hear my own heart breaking.
As one version of me pelted across the lawn toward Kessian, the other skulked out of the shadows. Through the trees, I kept Kessian in my sights, and the madman chasing after him barefoot.
Then I gave chase, too.
It was strange, remembering their terror. I’d lived it. Now, I experienced the eerie calm of carrying out the past like an actor playing his part, knowing where it led but not how it ended. Trusting that I would find a way to make things right when I got there.
I ran through the trees, up to the bank of the spring and slipped into the water, where Kessian waited for me on the surface.
The moment I submerged, my mind started to bleed. It hemorrhaged into the water, sucked out by the all-consuming strid and its corrupted magic. My desire to save became a compulsion to possess. I tried to curb it, but the instincts tore through. I dragged Kessian under.
Rescue, I reminded myself. He wasn’t an object, a piece of decoration to trick people into thinking you’d made your house a home.
I could hear my own muffled voice screaming underwater. I released Kessian’s ankle. I had him now. Mine. The waters embraced and held him up. He floated in the murk, eyes wide and terrified as I circled in.
Take, take, mine, can’t leave, can’t go, can’t let him be taken.
I reached out, wrapping a claw around Kessian’s neck. Yes. If we took him here and now, he could never leave. Not Shearwater, not me.
Those aren’t my thoughts. This isn’t me.
I tried to shake the strid’s jealous refrain from my head. Kessian’s fingers were digging through the shadows at my wrists, trying to pry my claw from his neck, and he looked—
Horrified. Scared for his life.
And resigned.
He was doing this to spare me. So that I could live. Because he cared for me.
A few memories parted the endless deluge of them. Kessian comforting me in a claustrophobic changing room. Revealing his secrets one by one. Leaving marks on each other’s lives like a door the color of baked cherries, clay fingerprints on skin, a love bite from all the times I’d kissed his neck.
I didn’t need to possess him. These moments were enough.
The strid’s memories had felt like hail stones pitted against my own, but now they softened. The strid paused, and my mind felt like my own.
My hand around Kessian’s throat transformed into an apologetic caress. I tipped my head forward and fought to speak.
“It’s me. It’s Tal.”
Kessian’s gaze was a eulogy of terror, hurt, yearning and, just below the surface, hope.
“I went back in time. It was me stealing the hours from us. I took Laurelie’s place, but I can’t purify the strid on my own. It keeps taking me over. It twists my feelings. Makes them selfish, and I’m too selfish to stop it.”
Kessian looked prepared to protest.