Page 55

Suddenly, the memory yanked her away. She was standing on the street.

The rain was coming down in sheets. She had no umbrella, and everything was strangely muted.

She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t smell. She couldn’t sense the air around her.

The tops of her ears felt weird when she touched them, and not just from Mum’s glamour. For real .

Kierse cut it off.

“What happened?” she asked.

Graves shook himself out of her mind. “You moved forward. After the spell.”

“I didn’t do anything. It just jumped.”

“That sometimes happens.”

She took a bottle of water from him and drained half of it. “Let’s try again.”

He placed his hands back on her. Kierse went under. She was at the end of the hallway. Her breaths came out in hard pants. The woman fell out of the room. This time Kierse deduced that she was speaking in an accented Spanish. She walked past on heavy feet.

Adair put his hand on his belt as if to pull out a weapon at her approach. Shannon was trying to stay calm, collected, but Kierse could see the hover of her magic around her, at the ready.

“7016.”

Mum put her hand on Kierse’s head.

“7018.”

She chanced a glance at her husband in fear.

“Next one.”

Kierse was jerked away. She stood in her living room. Mum leaned heavily against the countertop, tears in her eyes. Daddy was speaking to her.

“We had to.”

“I know,” Mum said. “But what do I do? We knew he couldn’t put the spell on a fully developed magical user.”

“Shannon, we will figure this out.”

“I’m a danger to her,” she said with a sniffle. “My magic will lead him here. I have to go.”

“Shannon…”

“It’s safer for her.”

“I’m right here!” Kierse burst out. “I’m standing right here. Don’t talk about me like I’m somewhere else.” She ran into her mum’s arms. “You can’t go.”

“I love you,” Mum said as she stroked her hair.

Kierse let her absorption drop again. Her head hurt like someone had driven a knife through her temple. Her magic was considerably more drained than she’d expected.

“What the fuck, Graves?”

Graves stood, striding across the room and returning with a box of tissues. “Here.” She stared at it in confusion. He gestured to his nose. “You have a nosebleed.”

Kierse ripped a tissue out and touched it to her nostril. It was a slow drip, but she wasn’t susceptible to them.

“Why is this happening?”

“It could be because of me. It’s happened before,” he admitted. “Though I’m not sure if it’s me or you.”

“Me? How could it be me?”

“Mafi did say that trauma could block the memories from resurfacing.”

Kierse bit her lip. “But they were working before. It’s just this one room.”

“Then it could be whatever is behind that door is too traumatic for you to witness.”

She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t feel like trauma. It feels like…” She wiped at her bloody nose. “I don’t know. Like the spell is still there.”

“The spell was broken.”

“It feels like there’s still something there. Some kind of block.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “It does feel like we hit something when we almost get to that room in Tribeca.”

“Tribeca? Is that where we were?”

“Yes, I recall the building,” he said.

“Could we go there?”

“It was twenty years ago. And it was destroyed in the war,” Graves said with a sigh. “No luck there, I’m afraid.”

She swallowed her disappointment. “It was a long shot, anyway.” She rolled her shoulders back. “Let’s go again.”

“Try to think of the magical signature you sensed in Sansara. We’ll see if that breaks through the block.”

Kierse took a deep breath. “I can do it.”

Her absorption dropped away. Graves’s hand was on her, his voice in her ears. “Take us back to the hallway.”

Kierse focused and let the hallway reappear before her. She’d time looped through it twice now. She knew the moment when the door opened and the woman spat something in Spanish. The fear across her mother’s face. The steel in her father’s. They were ready to fight if this went down.

“7016.” Her hand came down onto Kierse’s head.

“Pine and lemon,” Graves breathed so softly that for a second she could smell it again.

“7018.” Mum looked backward with alarm.

Kierse focused here. Let her wisp senses stretch. What had she detected in that hallway? What had she known even without knowing it? She wasn’t blunted yet. She didn’t have the spell on her. There was something under the fear.

“Next one.”

There.

The next door.

She could see it ahead. The 7020 on a little plaque on the front door. A little glow of magic around the frame. Warding, just like Mum could do. Just like in the library from the night before. And a smell…

Pine and lemon.

Just like in Sansara.

She was ripped away from the scent of that magic, as if she wasn’t supposed to have remembered that part.

She landed on the streets of New York. She’d just pickpocketed an unsuspecting tourist for money for lunch.

She was six and starving. Her mum had died in childbirth.

Her daddy had abandoned her without a word.

She had to survive. She couldn’t die. She touched the wren necklace against her chest, the only thing she had left of them.

It had been her mum’s. That was all she knew.

Survival was what mattered.

“Hey, kid,” a voice called. “Neat trick.”

Kierse whipped around as fear pierced through her.

A man was smiling down at her. He had dark features—dark hair and eyes—with an angular face and a kind look about him.

His hair was groomed, beard shaved clean, and he was dressed in nice clothes.

Nothing fancy, but cared for. Nicer than anyone living on the streets would wear, but not like the clothes of the people she stole from. Nondescript.

“What do you want?” she asked, mimicking a cool, adult voice.

“I can show you how to get better at that,” he said with a dark grin.

Jason.

Kierse dropped the connection. More blood trickled out of her nose. Enough that Graves passed her a second tissue with a concerned look on his face.

“It was him,” Kierse said. “Cillian Ryan. I smelled it.”

“We should stop there for today.”

“I can keep going,” she whispered.

“I don’t think so.” He handed her another drink. “We pushed too hard.”

Her head was pounding a quiet rhythm against her skull. She needed a break, and yet she couldn’t stop.

“Not hard enough,” she gasped as she downed the water. “We still didn’t see him.”

“We may not see him, Wren.”

She closed her eyes, unable to believe that. She had to see him. He was there in her memories. And yes, she had the confirmation she’d needed that the person who put the spell on her was also the person running the tree cult. Which meant he was the Curator and he would be at Monster Con.

But she wanted more.

“There was a guy in Sansara who recognized me,” Kierse said. “I thought he looked familiar, and then he said my name.”

Graves narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t mention that.”

“I forgot. We were in a rush, and it just came back to me.” She ran a hand back through her hair. “We should look for him. Maybe he’s a key from my past to unlock this.”

“He could be anyone ,” Graves argued. “You have no idea where you know him from. Maybe he wasn’t even connected to the Curator when you knew him.”

“I know, but he’s the last connection I have. Can we at least try?”

He stared down at her like he wanted to dismiss the scenario. Perhaps if it was anyone else, he would have. But he yielded for Kierse.

“We’ll try.”

Kierse sighed with relief and closed her eyes again. “I’m ready.”

Graves had her pull up the image of the guy she had seen in Sansara. He still seemed vaguely familiar, but no more recognizable than before. No idea how he knew her name.

She was sluggish as she searched through that memory for something familiar. She latched onto his face as Graves guided her forward, slipping through her murky thoughts like through sewage.

“Where have you seen him before?” Graves asked.

But she hadn’t seen him before. She didn’t remember, and Graves’s magic couldn’t seem to coax it out of her. Frustration bit at her as she pressed and pressed and pressed…

She was in the hallway again, staring up at the next doorway: 7020.

The magic signature coming off of it—the warding in place—all the answers right there before her.

She pushed and pushed and pushed, felt the memory almost crack along a fissure.

She was going to get in. She would be able to open that door. To find her answers.

Then the memory physically drove her backward. She gasped at the rebound, and Graves hastily severed the connection.

“Fuck,” she hissed, bending forward and cradling her head in her hands.

Her vision went blurry. Jagged edges sliced through her brain. She winced and shielded her eyes from the dim lighting. This was turning sharply into migraine territory.

And she was bleeding all over Graves’s chaise. Not just from her nose but from her eyes. She’d never fucking bled from her eyes.

“You are done ,” Graves said firmly as he bent to one knee and pressed a tissue to her nose. “For at least a few days. This shouldn’t be harming you this severely.”

He handed her another one that she used to wipe at her eyes. Tears streamed from them now, mixing with the blood. They ran in pink stains down her cheeks.

“We were close,” she whispered. “I felt it start to crack.”

“I am going to prioritize your health the way I wouldn’t if you were anyone else.”

There were shadows in his eyes at the proclamation. Fear. He’d hurt people with his powers before. Maybe many people. He knew the signs.

And if he wanted to keep her safe, he would. Even from himself.

She nodded. They’d pushed too hard. Even if she wanted to try to get through the crack in that memory, she couldn’t do it today. She could barely think. Her magic was shot like touching a frayed electrical wire.

“Why did it react like that?”

“We were pushing against something.” He took a fortifying drink of liquor. “Take a moment. Why would you not be able to get past that? Especially with my help.”

“He…he fucked with my head,” she guessed.

“Either the spell erased that memory or…he did.”

Kierse frowned. She had been so focused on how to get past the block that she hadn’t stopped to consider the why. The why that had been plaguing her since the beginning of all of this. Why would someone erase her memories? And why this memory?

“You think he didn’t want me to remember him.”

“That’s a theory.” Graves took another drink. “And with the power of Sansara, on a full moon, at the fall equinox,” he said, rattling off parts of the memory that she hadn’t even put together, “he’d be capable of it.”

“So what’s behind the door that he doesn’t want me to see?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

She wiped her nose and met his eyes. He nodded as if he wanted her to say it first. “So where do we go from here? Maybe if we just tried again.”

“No,” he said sharply. “I won’t let you continue to bang your head against a brick wall. We need another solution.”

She stared up at the ceiling. “We could go back to Covenant.”

He arched an eyebrow. “You’re ready for that?”

“Maybe Mafi is right. Maybe this is partially my brain holding back traumatic memories. She said we could come in whenever. Maybe we should go now?”

“Then let’s go.”