Chapter 29
The dark behind Vera’s eyelids swelled to an abnormal vastness that she intuitively understood to be some part of her mind. Everything beyond her mind, even her physical body, felt more like a dream.
“What are you looking for?” She asked it silently, testing her sense that Merlin couldn’t hear her active thoughts. He didn’t answer.
She felt his presence meandering through her memories, but there was no image of him, nothing to see. He wasn’t in her active, thinking mind. His foreign presence was solely in her memories. Merlin moved like he knew where he was going. There was a distinct tug toward one sensation: affection.
He pulled it forth like taking a book from a shelf.
Then, images flipped past in quick succession, slides of memory scrolling past until the Rolodex slowed.
The first thing that came into focus replayed as Vera remembered it: Arthur holding her as they danced before the crowd and laughing as he called out the moves to her—God, how had that just been yesterday?
She thought Merlin might stop there. That seemed a good place to begin, but he flipped past it.
Next was Lancelot. Short scenes in quick succession: him kissing her on the forehead in the throne room, nudging her with his shoulder on the hillside, laughing with her while on a run.
Not all her memories with him went by, but there were so many: throwing his hands in the air in glee that first night, running toward the woods the day they went to the sacred grove …
Vera deliberately moved away from this one, realizing that she had some control if Merlin was aimlessly flipping through.
Instead, she pulled forth one when they’d played tic-tac-toe and saw the adoration on his face in her memory.
“Guinevere,” Merlin said disapprovingly. His physical voice sounded like it came from the farthest point of a jet-dark pit. “You need to be careful.”
“It’s not like that,” she said, but he’d already moved on before she could offer more of a rebuttal. She chuckled despite her discomfort. What would he have said if he saw them half-naked in the cave together?
Merlin blazed onward, further back in her memories, back to university.
This couldn’t be right. This was too long ago.
It was the beginning of Vera’s third year, and she remembered this day in particular.
The stormy day when she’d met Vincent in the library.
It all played out as she remembered. It hurt to look at him in this memory, so full of life and light.
He had no idea … no trace of fear at what was to come for him and what would be his end.
Vera’s immersion in the memory broke. It lay open in front of her, but the focus shifted.
Darkness fell like the power to her mind was cut, and a loud ring in the obscurity of the black shook her as if she stood inside a church bell being struck.
The tone made her seize up. Merlin had promised there’d be pain, and that was the first sign of it.
“Keep breathing,” he said, his steady voice easing Vera some.
An incision sliced into the darkness, and a memory was born into her mind through it, but it wasn’t hers.
She was seeing it from someone else’s perspective.
The emotions that came with it were foreign.
They had to be Merlin’s. They had no home in her and experiencing them stung.
The new memory shimmered into focus, and Vera saw Guinevere from Merlin’s perspective.
Something of Merlin’s context mystically transferred to Vera, and she knew she was watching Guinevere and Arthur’s first meeting.
She radiated nervous joy as she curtsied in front of him.
There was her father not two steps behind Guinevere, severe even as he smiled, looking on as she passed Arthur a gift.
She couldn’t tell what the gift was from her vantage point—from Merlin’s vantage point, she corrected herself.
Guinevere and Arthur shifted, and Vera couldn’t see her face well, only his.
Beaming, he passed the gift straight to Lancelot and took both of Guinevere’s hands in his. He kissed the top of one.
Merlin’s emotions flooded Vera in full force. Relief and joy. Guinevere and Arthur—the hope for the kingdom.
It wasn’t so bad now that she was used to this memory. Merlin maneuvered the whole of it to nestle against the one of Vincent. They fit nicely there together. A bit of what Vera felt that first day for Vincent leaked into the new memory, spilling over and recoloring her affection for Arthur.
Then, there were emotions that weren’t Merlin’s nor Vera’s own, but they, too, came crashing into her mind.
It was Merlin’s understanding of what Guinevere felt: affection and attraction.
He inserted it with the rest, making one misshapen package.
That part hurt a little more. Vera gripped the arms of her seat and exhaled a stiff, shaking breath.
The lumpy memory settled in with the rest, and Merlin backed away from it.
She unclenched her muscles as the pain eased.
They were on the move again in Vera’s memories, shuttling past them in a blur.
They flashed by as the scenes with Lancelot had: Vincent’s fingers on hers under the table at a bar—this one from right before they officially started dating, dancing at Vincent’s sister’s wedding, and finally one of her last memories of him. Merlin stopped.
Vera and Vincent lay in their bed in Bristol.
His hand traced swirls across her bare stomach in a way that made her back arch, half tickled, half stirred into a gleeful lust. It was too intimate.
She didn’t want to remember this, and she sure as hell didn’t want anyone else seeing it.
And Vera couldn’t forget that this was her last night with Vincent before he died—just last June.
Barely half a year ago. She’d deliberately not thought of this, and while she could savor its goodness forever, it was tainted by the story’s ending.
She tried to put it away the way she had with the sacred grove, but Merlin was laser-focused as if he’d been looking for it, and it didn’t budge.
In the memory, she rolled into Vincent, and he buried his face into her neck. “I can’t believe I get to love you,” he’d murmured, raising goosebumps that raced over her skin.
She’d laughed. She’d gazed into his warm brown eyes, rich with earnestness and delight, and before she could say a word, his lips were on hers in no need of any verbal reply. The way Vera’s hips curved into him, the depth of her kiss, and the joy that emanated from her movements were enough.
A tear squeezed past her closed eyelid and rolled down her cheek in the murky pit of the world outside Vera’s mind. Merlin mercifully set the memory aside, present but no longer the focus.
Darkness fell before the sting of a new incision scorched through. Light shone in, unwelcome. The image shimmered like before and sharpened into focus. Guinevere and Arthur again, but it was wrong. Immediately, she could sense it was wrong. It was a private moment.
They stood atop the castle wall where Vera had only ever seen guards. She’d never thought to try to access it, but she saw it all through Merlin’s eyes from where he stood, concealed in the nearest guard tower. Vera could feel his guilt at watching them in secret.
Guinevere’s arms were spread wide along the wall’s stone rail, her head bowed between them.
Her hair hung loose and tangled. She was in an off-white shift dress, the kind Vera had been wearing as a nightgown.
Arthur stood next to her. He reached a hesitant hand to her shoulder, and she yanked away at his touch.
Vera gasped at her expression: that of a cornered animal, knowing it’s finished. There wasn’t any fight in it. Arthur approached her accordingly, his hands out before him with his palms up.
“Please,” he said, reaching out toward her but not closing the last six inches between them. “Please, let me help you.”
It was Guinevere, her shoulders falling, who grabbed his hand like it was a life raft and pulled into him, stiff against his chest. Arthur closed his arms around her.
He held her until she leaned back from him, the wild look replaced with something Merlin saw as being calmed but that Vera recognized more intimately as resignation.
Her stomach churned as Guinevere hooked her hand behind Arthur’s neck and kissed him, desperation in her taut limbs. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled for dear life. He yielded to the tug, sinking into her kiss as he stumbled forward.
Merlin’s relief came in a flood. He believed it was a show of love.
He saw devotion. He inserted his interpretation of Guinevere’s feelings—love, gratitude, and yearning.
But this woman who was so identical to Vera felt like she was a sister Vera had never met, and Vera knew better.
It was wrong for Arthur, too. His eyes flickered open, and they were wrought with worry, not love. Not even arousal.
What Vera experienced in her body wasn’t pain at first. Discomfort, certainly. Nausea, absolutely. It wasn’t so bad, and if it worked to bring Guinevere’s memories in union with her mind, it would all be worth it.
It hit like a boulder dropped on her head from above; sudden, unexpected, and with blinding pain. It set fire to Vera’s lungs—every bit of her skin hurt. There wasn’t a place on her body that wasn’t in burning torment: eyes, scalp, even her tongue.
Then she understood why. Merlin was trying to combine this memory with the tender one of Vincent.
He pressed them together as he’d done with the other.
Maybe it was because the emotions of it weren’t even close to being genuinely parallel or because there was so much pain in both memories.
It was agony beyond anything Vera had ever known. This was what torture felt like.
It only got worse. The memory wouldn’t stick. Merlin pushed harder.
“Stop!” she screamed, barely able to find the breath for it.
He paused but didn’t release her. Merlin maneuvered his memory around hers, prowling the edges and searching for a way in.
“We’re so close,” he mumbled.
He pushed, and Vera whimpered. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said frantically, expecting him to pull away as her tears flowed. He’d promised he would stop.
He began pulling the memory back. “Almost there,” he said.
Vera realized too late that Merlin was only moving back to build momentum.
The calm lasted two breaths before the foreign memory came hurtling toward her own, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
It smashed into Vera’s memory with such force that she screamed in a way she hadn’t done since she was a child, with all the power she could muster from her aching lungs.
The new memory shoved so violently against the old one that she thought she would shatter from the pressure.
There couldn’t be a pain worse than this.
In the midst of that unrelenting anguish, she would have been relieved to die.
But her chest continued to rise and fall. She tried to moan, but there was no air in her. Merlin relentlessly shoved against her memory.
And then it happened.
She didn’t shatter, but the memory of Vincent did. The shards of it exploded and impaled her mind in all directions.
Vera gasped in one agonizing lungful of air and shouted with all the force of her body a snarling “No!” as she snapped her eyes open.
She heard a thud and clatter on the floor behind her.
She hadn’t realized that she’d sprung to her feet in the same motion, freed from Merlin’s grasp.
She spun to find him on his back on the floor behind her, uninjured and rising to his elbows.
She took ragged, furious, horrified breaths and glared at him.
The implications of her shattered memory seeped into her.
She knew what it was, knew she’d been in her bed with Vincent.
She could remember his name, but the memory itself—the image, the details, the feelings—they were all rapidly fading like a dream that slipped away on waking. Water already down the drain.
Most horrifying, Vincent’s face was gone.
Just gone. His image had been erased not only from this memory but from all of her memories.
She knew who he was; she could even describe his features, but it was a poor rendition, a sketch an artist makes after a frantic witness describes the assailant. It was not him.
“Did you know?” Vera snarled. “Did you know what it would do to my memory?”
She hoped he’d say no. She silently begged him to, but he only stared at her. It was as good as a confession.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, her hands flinging to her head, gripping her hair. She’d never asked him if the procedure was safe. Never thought to ask if there’d be loss. “You’re a fucking psychopath!”
When Vera wheeled on him, he was rising to his feet and had the nerve to act disappointed. “I thought you understood how dire our situation—”
“I do! But all I had left of him was memory—” Her traitorous voice broke, and Vera clenched her teeth to steady her breath.
“He was the only one outside of my parents who could slip through this fucking curse and know me.” She’d never wanted to hit someone so badly, yet her whole body quaked.
Her fury took all her energy. She had to drop one hand to the top of the desk to steady herself.
“What happened to stopping if I said stop?”
“It needed to work,” Merlin said without apology. “I didn’t want you to have to do that again.”
“Oh, I’m not doing it again. You want Arthur to connect with me? Fuck with his brain. I’m done.” Vera stormed to the door, feeling emptier than ever.
“Guinevere—”
Vera turned to glare at him from the doorway.
“I thought being brought back to bear a child would have been the worst thing you could have done to me. But you gave me a whole goddamn life to fatten me up with parents who loved me and with Vincent, who—” She stopped and swallowed heavily.
“And for what? So I’d have more to sacrifice in exchange for Guinevere’s memories? ”
Merlin stared at her in silent sorrow.
“You should have let Viviane kill me.” Vera slammed the door behind her and did not look back.