CHAPTER ONE
Memories flash before my eyes. I know that they’re memories because they change too quickly to be real events that are happening right now. And because the same people keep appearing in different settings. The only problem is that I have no idea why I keep seeing these memories. They’re not mine.
In this memory, I’m standing inside a tidy but worn kitchen. There are two other people in there as well. A fae man with blond hair and eyes that are turquoise and silver. And a fae woman with long silver hair the same shade as mine, and eyes that are lavender and yellow in color. The woman appears to be searching for something, and she casts a distracted look at me while pointing towards the cabinet behind me.
“Selena, can you check the top shelf?” she says. “I’m sure I put it here.”
Selena. There is that name again. The name people keep calling me. Both in these memories, and outside of them. It’s a nice name. But it’s not mine. Because my name is…
I frown.
In the memory I’m still watching, I’m turning around and opening the cabinet before reaching towards the top shelf. But in my head, my real head, my mind is churning. Because my name is…
The answer is right there, at the edge of my mind. But I can’t grasp it. It’s like trying to catch smoke with my hands. Every time I reach for it, it slips between my fingers.
It mirrors my struggles in the memory too. Because in it, I am on my tiptoes, reaching for something on the top shelf. Then I slip. I yank my arm down to catch myself on the wooden counter, but instead, I smack my hand into the edge of the dish rack. It flips over, sending the glasses that were drying on it crashing down on the floor. I whirl around and stare down at them.
“I’m sorry,” I hear myself saying.
Because itismy voice. I sound very young, but the voice is distinctly mine. Which is strange, because the memory isn’t.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say in a choked voice in this strange memory.
Tears are even streaming down my cheeks.
Then I look back up at that fae man and woman from before. They were also looking down at the broken glasses, but now they look up at me in surprise. Then their expressions abruptly start transforming into deep resentment.
“No, no, no, please,” I beg in that young voice. “Please, don’t hate me. I didn’t mean to… Please, I didn’t mean to?—”
“You always ruin everything!” the fae woman snaps.
In my own mind, I just watch her impassively. I feel like Ishouldfeel something while watching this memory. But I don’t.
The kitchen disappears and another memory takes its place. Once again, it doesn’t belong to me. But someone who looks like me is somehow still in it. I know because I catch reflections of myself in a mirror on the wall while I’m trying to defend myself against two attackers inside an elegant bedroom. The two fae men attack me relentlessly.
One of them, a muscular guy, kicks me in the ribs and then in the side of my head, leaving me dazed on the floor. The other one, a slimy-looking fellow with beady eyes, rams a knife into my thigh. Then he raises the blade as if to kill me.
Once again, I feel like I should be terrified. But since this memory has never happened to me, I feel strangely detached as I watch it.
Yet again, the scene around me changes. This time, I’m at the edge of a thorn forest. I’m fighting a fae man who has light magic. He blazes it around me, blinding me. Then he tackles me to the ground and wraps his hands around my throat while he keeps demanding that I hand over some kind of ring to him. After I manage to get him to stop strangling me, he stomps his boot down on my ankle, shattering it. He punches me in the face and then forces my hand down on the ground. I’m still holding that ring when he starts stomping his heel down on my hand.
It’s a horrible memory. But once again, it isn’t mine.
More memories flash before my eyes.
In one of them, I get a collar locked around my throat and my magic sucked out of me before I pass out. In another, I’m watching a black-haired fae woman and a fae man with curly blond hair kneel half-naked, blindfolded, and shackled with iron in the middle of a banquet hall. In the next, I’m crawling on my hands and knees and licking a pair of black boots while people laugh in that same banquet hall.
Then I’m kneeling on the rough stone ground. I’m out on some kind of mountainside and there is an ice palace a short distance away. There are three more people out here. Two dragon shifters with silver wings and one with black wings. The guy with black wings is standing facing away from me, and his massive wings are spread out to his sides.
The man with silver wings draws his arm back and flicks his wrist.
I flinch as a whip cracks against the man’s black wing.
Not the version of me in the memory. The real me. The me in the memory gasps when it happens. But the real me, I flinch.
However, the movement is stopped by the restrains that are trapping me to this chair. Before this barrage of memories began, I was shackled to a chair in some kind of dungeon. I can only see these strange memories, so I have no idea what is happening around me anymore, but I once more yank against the steel that is binding me to this chair as the whip cracks into those black wings again.
Thankfully, the scene ends before the guy’s wings can be whipped further. I don’t even know why that particular memory affected me. I don’t even know who that dragon shifter with black wings is.
