Page 108 of Soulbound

"To the demon, yes," she replied.

"And what color am I?"

"You were black," she whispered, "but now you have a white sash, and you’re my king."

The tension in his shoulders dissolved as he began to think. "Can you recognize the other pieces the demon is wielding?"

"Yes."

Sebastian sat up, the sheet concealing his lap. "Then there's a way to discover who's working for the demon. You might recognize them."

There was a horrible feeling deep inside her; the thought that she could let him distract himself from the original question. "Sebastian," she whispered, and he seemed to realize there was something more she hadn’t told him.

His mercurial gaze sharpened. "That's why you asked me about my past. About Julia Camden. Who is the black queen?"

She didn’t want to answer. Doing so unleashed her fears into a world she’d just begun to claim as her own. It would turn him against her, perhaps bring about everything she’d seen.

And yet she needed someone else to know. She needed him to be there for her, to hopefully help her fight her terrible prophecy. "At first I assumed it was Morgana. But when it became clear it wasn't... I needed to go back into the past to find her. I began to suspect it was my mother, but in questioning Lady E about my mother's death, I learned it couldn't be. My mother died in childbirth. There was a sister, and for a moment I thought perhaps she'd lived. Perhaps my father spirited her away for some reason..." She wrapped her arms around her waist. "But I have been scrying, and scrying, and I can't find even a trace of her existence. And Lady E said something to me that day, about reading the Vision correctly. If I... if I assume the reason I can't find a trace of a blood relative out there is because there is none, that leaves me only one other possibility. One that makes sense in so many ways."

Especially the demon's interest in her, and Quentin Farshaw's insistence she was going to have to make a choice very shortly, toward the Light, or the Dark.

"Which is?"

"I think the black queen is also me."

* * *

"How can you be both white and black queens?"

It made no sense. But Cleo seemed to wilt under his regard, her misery and fear plain to see. She sank onto the windowsill, her arms wrapped around her, and her eyes shining within unshed tears.

"I’ve been reading about Quentin Farshaw," she replied.

"The first true seer."

"The only sorcerer who’s ever ascended to the tenth level," she corrected.

"You thought you saw a man pretending to be him in Balthazar's Labyrinth."

"I think that truly was Quentin Farshaw. He dabbled in demonology and he was obsessed with seeing through time. He thought there was a connection between being able to See the past or the future—and the ability to slip into the time stream physically."

"He also died in the middle of one of his experiments," he pointed out.

"Did he?" Cleo’s voice was a monotone. "There was no body. No blood. No viscera. Nothing human left in his laboratory once they broke the doors down. So did he die? Or did he finally achieve what he’d been trying to do all along?"

Sebastian flung the covers back, dragging his trousers up his legs and buttoning them. Her line of thought was troubling. "You think he finally learned how to walk through time."

"I think he’s out there somewhere," she admitted. "In some different time. I think he gave me the book deliberately, because he could sense what was coming and he wanted me to stop it."

"Then why doesn't he stop it?"

"I don't know." She threw her arms wide. "I could only fathom what it would be like to even try and change the future. It's difficult enough to see it, and to make minute changes. Every step you take down a different path opens up a different future. Visions constantly change. But to slip through time, into a period not your own, and shift even a single thing could potentially.... I don't even know what it could do. Perhaps we can stop the demon because we're in the here and now, so he gave us the clues to do so."

"It could have been one of the demon's allies, trying to distract you. To walk through time.... That's impossible, Cleo."

"So is translocation," she pointed out.

Verity, with her unpredictable gifts.