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Niamh tugged the door open. A bell jangled overhead. “Here we are.”

Kierse stepped through to the darkened interior with a single Edison bulb swinging over the entrance before disappearing into the maze of bookshelves. She inhaled the scent of paper and ink and leather. It settled her.

“Just as I remember,” Graves said, stepping to her side. His sleeve brushed against her jacket. For a second, she could smell his magic, and she realized that what had settled her in this place the whole time was…him.

She cleared her throat and put more distance between them.

Gen and Niamh followed next, the door swinging shut noisily behind them.

Niamh called into the bookstore, “Oisín?”

No response.

She waved her hand at the lot of them. “Just stay put. I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.”

Niamh tramped off into the stacks, disappearing almost instantly as if a cloud of black shadow had swallowed her whole.

“How classically Oisín,” Gen said, taking a seat in one of the threadbare, sagging armchairs in front of the antique cash register. “He probably got lost in the biographies again.”

“He does love to live in other people’s lives,” Kierse agreed.

Graves moved to the nearest bookshelf, looking a bit like a kid in a candy store.

He removed a book and thumbed through it before grabbing another one.

His stack almost instantly became ten high.

He brought them over to the counter by Gen and went back to the shelves.

Kierse focused her magic on him and could actually see the wisps of gold magic sliding around his body as he recharged.

Kierse had pickpocketed a few unsuspecting tourists on their way here.

Nothing of note—a pack of gum, a gel pen, and a handful of euros that she’d passed off to a local busker.

Stealing from Oisín was too easy, since the old man was always distracted and never quite cared what she carried off.

It didn’t energize her the way other tricks did.

Graves tsk ed. “Someone should really categorize some of this. This entire stack is almost unreadable from the mold. And the dust.” He wrinkled his nose. “Whose job is it to tidy this?”

“Who cleans your library?” Gen asked him.

“Magic,” Graves said with a smirk.

“Of course,” Kierse muttered. “Well, use some magic to clean this place up.”

“There’s a difference between keeping something clean and cleaning it to begin with.” He shook his head in dismay as pages fell out of a large leatherbound book. “Tragedy.”

A throat cleared hoarsely. “Sometimes the pages like to find new homes in other volumes.”

Graves looked aghast.

Oisín smiled toothily up at him. “Hello, Brannon. It has been many years.”

A grimace was all that revealed that Graves detested the use of his first name. He held his hand out to the stooped bookstore owner. “Long enough that I no longer go by that name. It’s simply Graves now.”

He took Graves’s hand in his wrinkled and age-spotted one. “Ah, yes, I believe someone mentioned that.” He tapped his forehead. “Some things stick forever and some things…” He waved his hand as if indicating a dark abyss from which it might never return.

“You still remember who I am, though, right?” Niamh asked.

Oisín smiled and reached up to pat her cheek. His long, robe-like clothing puddled on the floor, but when he lifted his arm, you could see he was wearing worn brown leather loafers that looked like they’d been plucked straight out of a medieval tale.

“I’d never forget my Niamh. You or my faerie love that you’ve named yourself for.”

“I love that you chose the name based on the story,” Gen told her with a small blush on her pale, freckled cheeks.

“It was always my favorite tale,” Niamh said, winking at Oisín. “And when I transitioned, it felt more me than anything ever had.”

“You are so like her,” Oisín said with that same sad smile.

The first time Kierse had entered Oisín’s bookshop, she’d never heard the story of Niamh and Oisín.

Kierse had thought Graves and Lorcan had suggested she try the Goblin Market bookstore to get more information, not that the owner himself actually had involvement with the Fae.

Oisín had given her a copy of the faerie tale, and it had been the first story she’d read when she began to dig through the spotty history of her people.

Graves always said that there was a kernel of truth to every tale that persisted, but until then, she hadn’t really believed him.

In the popular Irish faerie tale, a beautiful fae woman, Niamh, came into this world and fell for a human man.

Oisín left with Niamh to return to her world of faerie, where they were very happy for many years.

But he wanted to say goodbye to his family back in the human world.

Niamh agreed under the condition that he never left the horse she gave him, which he readily agreed to.

When he returned to his Dublin, he found that instead of a handful of years, hundreds of years had passed and no one he once knew remained.

On his return voyage, he fell from his horse and thus lost both his true home in faerie with his love and the human world that had left him far behind.

She’d returned to Oisín the next day, wondering if the story of Niamh and Oisín was one of the ones that held a kernel of truth.

“You are that Oisín?” Kierse had asked.

“I am,” he’d agreed.

“But…how? Wasn’t that hundreds of years ago?”

“My time in faerie marked me. While I aged to this almost instantly,” he’d said, gesturing to himself, “I remain the man I was when I left faerie in here.” He’d touched his heart. “I have not aged a single day since. With hopes to return and find my Niamh still waiting.”

Since then, Oisín had been helping her and Gen learn more about Fae.

She’d trudged through massive tomes, reading everything she could get her hands on.

The scant knowledge of wisps was particularly disturbing.

In most of the tales, will-o’-the-wisps were nothing more than faerie lights, especially around swamps, which led travelers off of their path.

In other iterations, they were jack-o’-lanterns, or a will-of-the-torch that helped luckier travelers through the night.

Sometimes wisps judged whether to help a stranger or not based on their actions.

So much of it was a mix of urban legend and faerie mischief.

For a few centuries, mortal scientists had claimed they were just bioluminescence in the marsh due to decay.

Boy, did she have a story for that hypothesis.

It was only with Oisín’s help that she had reconstructed an index of all powers the wisps had historically wielded to compare them to her own.

Absorption, time manipulation, glamour, and finding treasure—check.

Pixie light, persuasion, magic intuition, and possibly portaling—negative.

No matter how she worked at the latter powers, they stayed squarely out of her grasp.

She was happy enough with what she’d had, but Oisín feared that the spell had horribly altered her magic.

“I feel something has changed,” Oisín said, looking between them.

“She’s going into Nying, Oisín,” Niamh said. “We were hoping you’d talk her out of it.”

Oisín sighed. “You’ve been seduced by Nying as well? There won’t be answers about the Fae in there.”

“Or if there are, you can’t pay for them,” Niamh insisted.

Kierse hadn’t even considered that, but now that she was…

“Don’t even think about it,” Graves growled as if reading her mind.

“She’s not going for that,” Gen said. “It’s for her nightmares.”

“They’re not nightmares. They’re memories.” She swallowed, deciding that she might as well lay it all out now. “Memories of my past, my father. And they’re all jumbled up from the broken spell. So I need something to fix them.”

Niamh looked to Graves. “That sounds like your area.”

“I’ve been working on it,” he said roughly.

“Can’t you just read her mind and…”

“He can’t get through my absorption,” Kierse clarified.

“And she already turned down my offer. Anything you can do, oh High Priestess?”

Niamh shook her head. “I’ve been sending Gen all the books I have on nightmares. Memory is even harder to deal with. There might be a spell, but it wouldn’t be ready for another full moon, and it requires more energy than I can channel alone. Maybe if we brought in other Druids…”

“No,” Graves said at once.

“Well, tell us your great idea then, warlock,” Niamh said.

“If she won’t work with me,” he said carefully, “and it isn’t safe for her to work with Druids…then we should take her to the Covenant.”

“The witch doctors?” Niamh said, her eyes wide.

Kierse’s jaw fell open. “You’d work with Dr. Mafi again?”

Dr. Mafi had turned on them and given Kierse’s blood to the vampire King Louis. She’d only done it because she was indebted to him, but Kierse didn’t think Graves would ever forgive something like that.

“I would do whatever it takes to help you,” he told her, his eyes earnest. “Including aiding this asinine quest into the market.”

“Science isn’t going to fix a magical problem,” Niamh said. “Even witch doctor science.”

“You can’t know that,” Gen argued. “We don’t even know if what happened to Kierse’s memories is entirely because of the spell. That’s just one hypothesis. And to be fair, none of your potions were working, either. So why not try the medical side?”

“Because the Covenant is back home,” Kierse said. “And I’m going into the market tonight .”

“Is there any way to talk her out of this?” Oisín inquired.

“Probably not,” Gen said. “Not when she’s set her mind on it.”

“I can’t stop. Not when I’m this close to finding out what happened to my parents.”

“My dear, my deepest condolences on the loss of your parents and people. I feel the pain acutely,” Oisín said. “It does not, however, change the fact that that place is a monstrosity.”

“Surely, it can’t be that bad. Your shop is the entrance, isn’t it?” Gen said softly.

“Indeed, the market has resided in this location far longer than I have had this shop. It is the home to goblins, true. They run their goblin fruit operations out of the market entrance, which is its primary purpose, but it is an illicit den of iniquity, the likes of which I have never seen elsewhere on this earth.”

She needed to recover her memories. For her magic, her parents, and for herself, it was worth it, even if she had to walk into a monstrosity to get them back.

“I’m going,” she said decisively.

“Kierse…” Gen whispered. “It sounds like this place is really dangerous.”

She nearly laughed. “Yeah. What else is new?”

“Stubborn,” Graves grumbled.

“It’s a bad idea,” Niamh said.

“I’m prepared to pay the cost,” Kierse said, turning around. “There’s a reason the spell was put on me and why my memories were taken from me. My parents are dead. There are no more Fae. I am the last of my entire race. I need answers. If this is how I get them, then so be it.”

Everyone fell silent. Even Graves just crossed his arms. He didn’t agree, but perhaps he knew her well enough not to argue any further.

Gen put her hand on Kierse’s arm. “I want you to have those memories back. Of course we all want you to regain them.” She stood and tugged Kierse into a hug, and Kierse was still amazed that she didn’t flinch at the intimate touch. “Are you sure this is the only way to get them?”

Kierse glanced at Graves.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Gen said without hesitation.

“Then this is the best option.” She steeled her spine. “I’m going in tonight.”

“Tonight it is,” Graves said with a slight shake of his head.