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Memory Stream

While the preparations were being made for our attack on the Guardians’ Sanctuary, I spent the time with Nero and Angel in our room. My cat was indulging in a very long nap, obviously resting up in anticipation of channeling that much magic. She was a smart little kitty. Actually, she was a smart big kitty. My lion-sized feline companion was no house cat. She took up a whole bed all by herself.

“I need your help with something,” I said to Nero.

“Anything,” he replied immediately.

“The octuplets are hiding something from us, something out of the past. I intend to find out what it is. And I need you to be my tether, just like you did before, so I don’t get lost in the memory stream. Time is so open, so endless.”

“You’re planning on using your magic to look into the past?”

“My magic.” I stroked my very round belly. “And hers. She’s stronger now. Her powers have grown a lot. If the three of us combine magic, together we can figure this out.”

Nero set both his hands on my belly, over our daughter. “She really is that powerful,” he said in awe.

I smiled. “Yes, she is. And with her help, with her magic, we’ll be able to see directly into the past. We don’t need to view the past through the Vault, which the octuplets have stuffed full with preselected memories. We will control what we see or don’t see, not the octuplets.”

“Then let’s get started. We don’t have much time left before the battle.”

His hands were still on my belly. I set my hands over his, then I reached out with my mind, connecting to both my husband and to our daughter.

* * *

I was in a jungle.I didn’t see Nero beside me, but I could feel that he was with me, just as I could feel our child.

I looked down, but I didn’t have a baby bump anymore. In fact, I wasn’t even inside my own body anymore. Whoever’s body I was in was very small. I extended my hands in front of me. They were a child’s hands.

I took a few steps toward a nearby stream. A young girl of nine or ten with pale blonde pigtails and big, inquiring eyes stared back at me. She looked like a younger version of me—no, a younger version of my mother. I had my father’s eyes.

So I was in Grace’s body, back when she’d been a child.

She tucked a few loose wisps of hair behind her ears, then walked away from the stream. She followed the trail deeper into the jungle. I wasn’t in control of her body. I was only a passenger, a witness to some past event that would shed some light on my existence.

At least that’s what I hoped. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d never before gone fishing for gold nuggets of information in the memory stream.

I saw a faint flicker of movement. A few steps off the trail, a man stepped through a tree, then disappeared. Of course he’d never really been there. His body had been too translucent. He looked like a memory fragment, like a scene out of the distant past.

It was Grace who’d come to that conclusion. It seemed I was tuned in to her thoughts.

Her powerful telepathic abilities allowed her to see that hidden magic mirror where others would just pass it by, unaware that there’s a passage to another world nearby,Nero said in my mind.

Grace stepped up to the magic mirror. It truly was hidden, even when seeing it through Grace’s eyes. She’d only found it because she’d caught the memory fragment of someone who’d once taken it.

She took the plunge. As she passed between worlds, a cool feeling washed over me, like I’d walked through a waterfall.

Grace looked around at the new world she’d discovered.

This isn’t a demon world,she thought. Or any world I know about.

From her hiding spot in the snowy woods, she watched a boy teleport between rings that had been set up around a sports field.

A djinn,commented Nero.

Also on the field, two teenage girls stood facing each other. One fired a gun at the other. The girl who’d been shot in the head fell dead to the ground. No one rushed over to her. No one expressed any shock whatsoever at this very public murder.

A few moments passed, then the dead girl rose from the ground, alive once more.