Page 67 of Soulbound

"Take her hand." Madrigal cocked her head. "Are you bonded?"

He nodded.

"Then reach for her through the bond...."

Madrigal talked him through the transfer, until Cleo's color had settled and she shifted slightly on the bed.

"She's still lost in the currents of time, I think," Madrigal murmured. "We have to reach her before it's too late, and drag her back. Overreach like this could destroy some of her gifts."

"How do we get her back?"

"You," Madrigal said. "You get her back. You use your bond to reach her, and convince her to return. I'll talk you through it. I can't reach her without you."

"What do I do?" He could sense her gaze upon him. "What is it?"

"There is a great darkness within you." Madrigal curled her hand protectively against her chest. "It's going to destroy you one day."

"Maybe."

Madrigal reached for Cleo once again. "She's the only thing holding your darkness at bay. So I will help her, not you. For all our sakes. For London."

* * *

"To find the black queen you need to go back to your past," Quentin Farshaw had told her.

Cleo floated in a world of nothing. She'd spent her nights walking her dreams, trying to remember, but she hadn't found the point in time that he referred to. Yet something felt different now. The second she'd begun to future-walk, something opened up within her, like a long dormant gift had been hiding—or waiting perhaps for the right moment to show itself.

She knew now, how to find what she was looking for.

"Find me the black queen," she whispered, and began sifting back through her past, seeing it flash by in endless years of blindness, until suddenly there was color again.

Black queen, black queen, black queen. She locked on the thought, using it to track her hidden nemesis. Something pulled her back deep into the past, slamming her into a single moment.

Cleo opened her eyes.

She stood like a wraith in the hallway of her father's mansion, many years in the past. Holly decorated the mantle in the sitting room, and the scent of pine needles filled the air. Christmas. He'd never celebrated it. Cleo frowned.

Or had he once?

"Show me the black queen," she whispered, and the tug drew her along the hallway.

The drone of her father's voice began to echo through her mansion. Cleo walked along the marble floors she knew so well, her bare feet flinching at the cold. Winter, judging from the snow on the windowpanes. And December if she were to use the holly as a clue.

But at what point of time?

"Hecarah di asmosis. Solaris ni tenduin. Come forth, my lord. Come forth," her father called.

Cleo winced. The language he used hurt her ears. What was he doing?

Light beckoned along the hallway, behind a half-closed door. There was no sign of the servants, though Lord Tremayne sometimes gave them the night off when he was performing his darker works.

Trepidation filled her as she reached for the door. Black queen, black queen, black queen.... Her heart pounded in time to the words. Seeing this would change everything. She just knew it.

She pushed open the door, finding herself in a cellar that had been fitted out with her father's ritual altar. A hexagram was painted on the floor in blood, and a woman knelt in the center of it in her nightgown, another bloody hexagram painted on her forehead. Her long silvery-blonde hair cascaded down her back, her brows dark in her heart-shaped face.

She could have been Cleo's twin.

Mother. Cleo clapped a hand to her mouth. Her mother had died when she was two, which meant this had to be over twenty years ago. She couldn't remember her mother, and she'd never seen a picture of her, thanks to the blindfold.