CHAPTER 22 LYRA
LYRA
Onomo Crescent was a perfectly ordinary street, but the moment Lyra saw the street sign, she knew.
ONOMO CRES.
“Monoceros.” Grayson beat her to unscrambling the letters out loud.
“Another twisted little clue.” Lyra sounded calmer than she felt. Lily. Omega. Monoceros. Whoever the man who’d abducted her had been, he’d known about all three. He’d known that A Hawthorne was one of them. He was very likely expecting the then-Omega to come for him.
Because of what he knew? Lyra wondered. Or was there more to it than that? And why did he take me? Lyra and Grayson made their way down Onomo Crescent. Why lay this game out for me?
The door to number 947 was painted teal. The oddest sense of déjà vu washed over Lyra, just looking at that door from the street.
“There’s no one home.” Grayson was characteristically confident of that assessment. “We’ll find a key inside that lockbox on the front door. The owners have already vacated the property.”
“You can’t possibly know that just by looking at the house,” Lyra said.
“Can’t I?” Grayson replied.
It took him a mere three tries to break the code on the lockbox, and it was immediately clear when the door swung inward that he’d been right.
The house was bare, no furniture whatsoever.
Stepping across the threshold and into the foyer did nothing to jog Lyra’s memory, not until she closed her eyes and heard Grayson’s footsteps on the tile floor behind her. Footsteps.
And just like that, Lyra could feel hands on her shoulders—big hands, small shoulders—steering her into the living room.
“Happy birthday, Lyra.”
Lie-ra. Lie-ra. Lie-ra.
The man loops around to crouch in front of her. He isn’t smiling. His eyes are just like hers, but suddenly, they look… wrong.
“I want my mommy.”
“I know you do, Lyra.” He says her name wrong again.
“My name is Lyra.”
“No. It’s not.” The man reaches into his jacket, and then he hands her a white calla lily. “Happy birthday, Lyra.”
Lyra opened her eyes and realized she wasn’t in the foyer anymore. She’d walked into the living room, eyes closed, to the exact spot where she could remember standing as a child.
From that spot, she could see the stairs.
Years earlier, they’d been wooden, but they were carpeted now. Lyra could see the steps through the railing, but she couldn’t see the top of the staircase, couldn’t see the landing where she’d found the body.
Lyra willed her feet to move, willed herself to walk to the stairs and slowly up them, her body shaking all the while.
“You can stop if you need to,” Grayson said.
“No, I can’t.” Lyra was halfway up the stairs now, and she realized with a start that she’d taken off her shoes without even thinking about it.
You’re not supposed to wear soccer cleats in the house, she thought, past and present beginning to blur, step after step, all the way to the top.
Blood on my feet.
The next thing Lyra knew, Grayson was holding her, and Lyra wanted nothing more than to let him hold her, to look at his face, to drink in every last detail of it, to forget that anything else existed.
But she had to remember, so she pulled back from his embrace and retreated down the stairs, back to the living room, to the exact spot where she’d stood as a child.
Think about the flower. Lyra willed the past to sweep her away. Think about the candy necklace. Think about the gun. She forced herself to conjure up the dead’s man voice.
Happy birthday, Lyra.
A Hawthorne did this.
Slowly, another memory began to rise like smoke from the depths of Lyra’s subconscious. There was no visual element to it, only words—words that Lyra had never heard before in any flashback, in any memory, in any dream.
“What is it?” Grayson asked beside her.
Lyra focused on his voice and blinked until the sharp angles of his face came back into focus. And then she told him the words she’d remembered, the words her kidnapper had said to her right after that fateful sentence about A Hawthorne.
“Don’t be afraid, Lyra Catalina,” Lyra whispered, pronouncing her own name wrong. “She will come for you.”