“I’m not sure. I can’t see his face, there’s so much mist. I think about how angry he is. A chill shreds my spine when he threatens so darkly to throw me over the cliff.”
I lick my lips, recognizing that she’s in some haunted trance state and I shouldn’t interrupt as it comes back.
“I’m not Fable. It’s like…I’mher.” Her words come quicker now, hands shaking. “‘My father will kill me if I go home,’ I remember pleading. He growls that he doesn’t care, that what I do is my responsibility. He’s hurting me.” Tears burn down Fable’s face, leaving salty scars. “When I threaten to tell his wife or one of my friends in Kylemore about what he did, he grips my wrist and wrenches me closer to the edge of the cliff and says I wouldn’t be the first body he’s had totake care of at the cliff.”
A shudder rolls through me as I realize that I know this story. She’s remembering her great-aunt’s murder. Does she know it yet?
Tears chase down her cheeks before she sobs, “She didn’t have anywhere to go. Her sister was so madly in love with baron, and she was stuck here on Skye, locked by fate to this evil man and Leith. She had no way out. Her father would kill her, and her sister would kill herself if she discovered that the very man she’d professed to love was the same who’d raped her younger sister. She felt so much shame and disappointment for the mark she’d left on the family, when she only wanted to protect them.” Fable wrings her hands, looking up to the sky with eyes unfocused before she speaks again. She’s a channel, I realize then; her ability to perceive emotions across realms is unlike anything else I’ve seen before. She locks one of her hands around her wrist as if she’s demonstrating as she explains the events unfolding. “I…I used all of my strength to twist away from him. I knew I might fall, I knew it might lead to my own death, but I left my fate to the wind because, in my own hands, I’d ruined everything.”
Awareness shakes me as I realize why she hasn’t been with me all this time.
Fable wipes tears from her cheeks as she whispers, “She thought if she timed it right, there would be a witness who would think he had pushed her over the edge. So that even in her death, justice could be served for the cruel torture he’d made her and the others endure. She had the cursed amethyst in her dress pocket. Her mother had washed it in holy oil and chanted incantations over its facets for weeks as she blessed the souls of the missing of Kylemore and the future women of the village. There were so many women.” Fable blinks, as if seeing a silhouette before her in the dark. “She says she believed she could fly, and that even if her physical form couldn’t, at least she could help prevent another soul from falling into his clutches if he was locked away for murder.”
“Fable…” I breathe, wrapping her hand in mine to ground her to us. “Fable, do you believe what just happened was a dream or reality?”
She blinks, wide eyes on me before replying. “It feels more real than any dream I’ve ever had. I heard every uttered word between them, felt every terrified beat of her heart and the man…that evil man felt so familiar.”
I nod. “That man is my father.”
“How? I-I don’t know your father.” Her questions burn in my ears.She’s not there yet.
“Not in this life.”
“Which?” She turns to me fully, desperation lacing her usually warm irises. “Which life, Alder? I don’t remember.”
I press my lips together, the stubborn side of me already deciding to push her harder. “Whyare you here, Fable?”
Her eyes crinkle as she shutters them closed. I drop my hands on her head and caress her temples with the pads of my thumbs. “Whyare you here, sweet Fable?”
I feel her throat constrict as she swallows. A tremor of something passes through her frail form before she looks up at me with watery eyes. “My great-aunt Beth. I need to know what happened to her.”
I nod once, afraid to close my eyes, and she falls apart in my arms.
“Am I her?” she asks quietly, as if she’s afraid of the answer.
“No,” I reply firmly, my hands cradling her chin to force her eyes to meet mine. I need her to stay with me for all of my next words. “You are you. And Olympia. And Fawn too. And thousands more lives, but in those, we intersect.”
“The lifetimes we’ve intersected?”
I nod, then look up at the stars. “I prayed so damn hard for this day, and now that it’s here, I don’t have words for it. I never thought about what I would say, only that I would get the chance to say it. I believe that’s why you were called here. Because of me. I knew we were star-crossed.” A rogue grin slides across my lips as I try to lighten the moment. “Only our tale is more tragedy than love story.”
“Like Hamlet and Ophelia.” She cowers under my arm as if she’s trying to hide from the truth of us.
“Madness and revenge…obligatory evil parent…”
She chuckles in my arms, and I’m so glad to feel as if she has more knowledge than she had moments ago.But this still isn’t over yet.
“So, what happened to him, then?” she finally asks.
I shrug, hating my next word. “Nothing.”
“No investigation?”
“Nothing,” I confirm. “I wasn’t sure before, but now I think Keats witnessed our father arguing with your great-aunt that night. He didn’t know what he was seeing at the time, but he knew enough to wake me up and drag me down to the ocean’s edge to search for a body once my father returned to Leith alone. We never found anything, not a shred of evidence to support Keats’s story. That was the night he acquired his limp. During our search, a wave sandwiched him between two boulders before nearly yanking him out to sea. I almost lost my life trying to save his. I confess I thought he was crazy then, the overactive imagination of a teenager. I haven’t thought of that night until now.”
I swipe at the jagged scars that drag like angry talons across my forearms. “These were my first scars trying to save a life.” My heart shreds in my chest cavity as I recall swimming through the waves to get to her. I was too late to save Olympia. Too late to save her aunt. But things were different with Fable.
“Our deaths have always been tied together.”
