Marlowe whimpered. The wraith uncoiled, straightening its hunched back, its head unfolding from within, sprouting antlers from the fissures in its head, no longer resembling my sister, just the ghostly residue of her rage and mine baptized in the spring’s wild magic, where I could only guess at what visions she’d seen.
The rest of this memory I knew. Torches bobbed toward us, and Mum’s scream followed. I would throw myself at the wraith, and to both our surprise, it would blanch at the sight of me and retreat, forever embedding the notion that I controlled it, that it followed me, when really it had always been Laurelie, who couldn’t kill her twin brother.
Chapter 37
The memory spat us out onto the banks of the Bloodstream once more. I stared up at the weblike pattern of watery reflections in place of a sky, trying to summon the strength to move, but the last revelation was one too many.
Where did I go from here? I knew who the wraith was, I knew who the murderer was, and yet I was no closer to cleansing the strid.
“Tal?”
Kessian’s face appeared in my vision. This time, he didn’t ask if I was okay. His hand hovered like he was searching for which hurts needed soothing most. In the end it laced with mine.
“Tal, we have to go. We don’t have much time.” He flipped open the watch, wincing. “One hour.”
“Where do we go? I don’t have any more dead family members to investigate.”
“I think we need to try and talk with Laurelie.”
“She’s not Laurelie anymore. She tried to kill you. She took Amelia.”
Kessian rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. “She has a connection to you, though. If she’s still in there, you’re the only one who can reach her.”
“How?”
“Do you still have the talisman Marlowe gave you?”
“No. I left it in Lunaris.”
Kessian nodded thoughtfully. “That works.”
“It does?”
“If we go back to the day of the wedding, when everyone’s busy and the wraith is trapped in the shed, we could go to Lunaris nearby, get the talisman, and see if we can use it to reach Laurelie. It’s connected to her death, so it stands to reason it could have the power to bring her back to … herself.”
To life.That was the hope neither of us dared speak aloud. Amelia had come back, but she’d only been gone a day. Still … We returned to the wall of clocks in Grandad’s study, to mine, and input the date and time of the wedding. When the world melted away, it dropped us into the pavilion by the spring, where the me of twelve hours ago arranged chairs for the ceremony.
Kessian and I wasted no time in crossing the grass, weaving past the gardens and trees to the place Lunaris was parked. My fingers touched the door handle, and she unlocked for me, as aware of my presence as if I were flesh and blood, not a spirit whisked to her through the stream of time.
Her curtains fluttered in greeting. I wished I could hug her.
“Missed you too.”
I went to the bedroom and cast around the bedside cabinet and drawer for the talisman. I’d last used it to banish the wraith when it had snuck up on Kessian in his sleep. It had fallen on the floor, where it had come loose from the earring fastener it had been attached to.
I emerged from the bedroom, holding it up. “I’ve got it. Let’s go.”
“One second. Look at this.”
I didn’t think we had a second, but Kessian showed me the spectral pocket watch. It seemed to have frozen, but after a long moment of watching, the second hand ticked forward once more.
“Remember when the pantry sort of … transformed to give me a seat?” Kessian said. “Familiars are creatures of wild magic. Do you think she managed to … I don’t know, follow us into the time stream to slow things down?”
At the time, I had thought I’d felt her comforting presence, but chalked it up to my emotions and the dream-like atmosphere of the Bloodstream playing tricks on me. But time in the real world did pass more slowly, soif she could have a foot in either one, Kessian’s explanation was plausible. I leaned briefly against the wall, gratitude for the both of them briefly overwhelming me. Kessian, who presented me with solutions when I was too exhausted to see another way besides the one that had always worked: running away. Lunaris, who’d remained the most steadfast friend over the course of a long, lonely road. We still had to leave to confront the wraith and speak to Laurelie, but the security of having a contingency offered some relief.
Coin in hand, we went out to the shed with the faint blue glow creeping under its door. We unlocked and opened it, taking a few quick steps back.
The wraith waited within, its hunched form twisted up in the sigil. It registered us, uncoiling but calm. Recalling the ferocity with which it had thrown itself at the prison when we’d shown my family, I wondered if that had been a reaction to Marlowe.
