Page 24

The apartment was a shoebox. A pair of threadbare chairs sat in the open main space connected to a small kitchen.

A mattress rested on the floor across the room.

The bathroom lay beyond the only door, which was ajar, and the water was running in the shower.

A man’s voice sang sweetly. Light streamed in from the miniscule window that was half blocked by an air-conditioning unit.

Kierse could make out the dirty streets beyond, but she didn’t have enough context to place where she was.

It was drab and rough and could have been anywhere.

Kierse stared down at her hands in confusion. Was this part of the dream? This tiny apartment with a man singing in the shower? Where was she ? If this was her memory?

“Daddy! Daddy!”

Kierse jerked around as the door to the apartment crashed open. A small girl ran inside as the water shut off. A rough white towel was jerked off of a hanger, and a man strode out of the room with it wrapped around his waist.

“Hello, my wee darling,” he crooned in a lilting Scottish accent, picking up the small child and lifting her into his arms. “How was school? Did you learn anything new?”

“Nothing much,” she said in what was clearly a lie.

The girl was unmistakably, categorically striking. Long, ashy-blond hair with angelic features and wide, dark eyes that seemed to suck the light out of the room. She had a mischievous glint in those eyes and an impish smile for her father.

In her much younger features, Kierse could see it clearly for herself.

She was that young girl. She no longer had the dark-blond hair, which had aged to a darker brown.

Her features had all been changed under the spell anyway.

The ears were there, slightly pointed, the shape of her mouth, and there, the little wren necklace hanging on her much smaller body.

Tears came to her eyes as she watched the interaction.

Her father had…loved her. He was looking at her with adoration.

A muscular man built like an ox, with the same dark hair Kierse had currently, though with a slight curl to it.

A tattoo of a wooded landscape snaked down his arm, a horned stag proud and prominent near his elbow, and the whole thing entwined with a Trinity Knot at the wrist.

“She’s a thief is what she is,” a woman said, striding inside the apartment door with arms full of groceries.

“Did she get caught?” the dad asked with a similar grin to his daughter’s.

“Of course not!” She dropped the groceries onto the only available counter space and swiveled to stare at them. “She was trained too well by her misbehaving father.”

“Mummy!” the girl cried.

Kierse’s heart stuttered and stopped.

That word alone made her want to sit down on the small mattress in the corner and not get up for a hundred years.

Her mother was standing before her. They were roughly the same height.

Kierse might have been an inch taller. Their eyes were the same depthless dark brown, but her mom’s hair matched Kierse’s younger self—an ash blond that had never seen hair dye. Beautiful, stoic, and proud.

Kierse reached out to touch her face, but her hand passed straight through. A memory. Nothing more than a memory. And already it had gotten away from her.

No matter that for her entire life she had believed that her mother had died in childbirth. Here she was—alive and well, locked away in Kierse’s memory.

“You need to stop teaching her these things, Adair,” her mother said. “It’s going to get her in trouble.”

“Stop worrying, Shannon,” her father said, setting the girl down on her feet. “I’m teaching her life skills. No one is going to find her all the way over here. For now, we are safe.”

“For now,” Shannon said. A deep resignation settled on her shoulders at the words.

Adair disappeared back into the bathroom and came out in trousers and a fitted shirt. He padded barefoot to his wife and kissed her.

“It will be all right. We’re going to fix all of this.”

Shannon nodded. “Of course.”

Kierse wondered what exactly they were trying to fix. What they were running from—because it was clear in the packed bags and empty apartment and scared hunch of her mother’s shoulders that they were running. Was it what had killed the rest of the wisps? Had it caught up to them, too?

The smaller version of Kierse was running around their heels, telling them all about school and the eraser she’d stolen but hadn’t gotten caught for. Apparently, her father was the one who had given her that skill. The one that had helped her stay alive when she’d been left to the streets.

“I heard from my contact,” Shannon said a time later, when the little girl was pretending to do her homework and was instead listening in on her parents’ conversation.

“And?” Adair asked.

“He has an address and a meet time. We can go tonight.”

“Tonight?” Adair asked, steel entering his voice. He’d gone from loving father and husband to a hardened soldier in the span of a second. As if the carefree man was the mask he wore over his true identity.

Shannon glanced at her little girl. “We have to do it. She’s not safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am. We can’t trust anyone else.”

“Can we trust him?”

Shannon met his gaze with a hardened one of her own. “At least we know where his allegiances lie.”

“Then tonight it is.”

Kierse could have sat in that tiny apartment for all of eternity and watched her family go about their lives. Banal, ordinary, almost boring, and yet it was a spark of a star in her stomach. The life she’d never known. The life she’d kill to have back.

But the memory jumped too quickly and suddenly she was in a town car.

Her younger self was tired and yawning, resting her head against her father.

But she was still alert in a way that could only be learned from vigilant parents.

She knew that she hadn’t been woken in the middle of the night and ushered into a car worth more than they made in a year for no reason.

They were in some kind of tunnel, so Kierse still had no context for where they were. As headlights glowed in the distance, they came to stop before an underground elevator.

Her stomach plummeted.

“No,” she whispered even though no one could hear her.

The driver opened the back door and ushered them out of the car and into the elevator. Kierse didn’t want to believe that she knew where they were until the door opened, revealing a butler dressed in black—Edgar.

There was no denying it.

Her parents—and her younger self—were now inside Graves’s house.

“What a pleasure to have you in residence. I am Edgar.” He bowed slightly for them. “We shall be going to the library this evening.”

Adair nodded gruffly, tucking his daughter into his side. He took Shannon’s hand, and together they followed him up the stairs to the most familiar double doors Kierse had ever encountered—the entrance to the Holly Library.

A plaque above the doors announced the name, and wards in a language she could almost read were carved in the doorframe. Graves’s symbol—the holly vines—threaded through the pattern. His magic was everywhere. His domain. His . Just as she was, every time she stepped inside.

Edgar led them into the library. Much the same as Kierse had ever known it.

Thousands upon thousands of books covered every square foot of space, towering ever upward toward the ceiling with only a small opening high above them revealing the moon.

Holly vines hadn’t yet choked the books as they did in present day, but they were beginning to creep in.

The furniture was different as well—still expensive brown leather, made for meetings and not lounging. The table with his infamous book, where he had all of his visitors sign to keep his identity secret, was within reach.

Isolde bustled in then. Graves’s chef and old friend was dressed in her usual black-and-white garb. Twenty years younger and Kierse saw the beauty who was now hidden beneath her graying hair and wrinkled skin. “My name is Isolde. It’s a pleasure to have you in residence tonight. Tea?”

“No, thank you,” Shannon said stiffly.

Isolde smiled kindly at them. Her eyes shifted to the girl, which Kierse still struggled to remember was herself. “No biscuits for the little one?” She held up a thin sugar cookie, and young Kierse’s eyes lit up. But Shannon shook her head.

“Of course.” Isolde curtsied and disappeared from the room.

No one said anything. Her parents exchanged hardened, worried glances. The girl eyed the cookies and bit her inner cheek, puckering her face as she restrained herself.

They waited a few minutes, and then the doors opened and Graves appeared.

Kierse’s breath caught at the sight of him.

So much the same and somehow more withdrawn, more threatening, more deliciously broody.

His sharp cheekbones were cut in the shadows of his library.

The perfectly pouty mouth a flat line at the appearance of his guests, those thunderstorm eyes sparking lightning in displeasure.

He was pain and pleasure and destruction.

Kierse wanted him like this in her memory forever.

“You may call me Graves,” he said as he strode across the room in his fancy suit and black leather gloves. He poured himself a drink without offering to anyone else. “Why are you here?”

Just like that. For some reason she’d thought he’d have more finesse in negotiations. This was his job, after all. Knowledge above all else. Perhaps it was just her parents that sent him straight to business. She wouldn’t put it past him to already know who and what they were.

“Do you not already know?” Adair asked gruffly.

Graves’s eyes slid over Adair and straight to her mother. “I recognize a wisp when they’re in my home.”

He said the words like a threat, and Kierse realized, in the shape of his shoulders and careful nonchalance, that he saw them as such.