The image came back to me. Those bilious liquid shadows forcing his mouth open and spiriting down his throat like a plague of insects fleeing the light.
I refused to believe he was gone. If Laurelie was here beside me, we could get Kessian back somehow.
“Laurelie, listen,” I said.
But she was getting up and running toward the torches. Their glare fell upon her. I shielded my eyes from it.
Someone said, “It can’t be.”
Then one of the torches dropped from the hand of the person holding it, and Fae marched out of the glare and threw their arms around their lost sister.
“Are you— Is it really you?”
“My God. How is she alive?”
And someone else said, “Where’s Kessian? Where’s Tal?”
“I’m right here,” I said, but they didn’t hear, and I stopped expecting them to.
Something about this wasn’t right. It tugged at the corners of my exhausted instincts.
I reached into my pocket for the watch. My fingers brushed metal. It was still there, still flickering between the new and the rusted, tarnished images of itself. I opened it and could hardly make sense of what I saw.
There were four hours left.
But … that shouldn’t be the case. There’d only been minutes left before.
If the Bloodstream had somehow given me more time, I wouldn’t waste more questioning it. I had to get Kessian back. I racked my brains for what could have caused this sudden skip backward, how it was possible.
My fingers ran over the cool, semitransparent surface of the pocket watch in my fist. It had counted down the final hours of our lives. Sometimes it had run fast.
What if it hadn’t been skipping ahead? What if … What if I—this future version of myself—had skipped back, and used up that time in another memory. One my past self hadn’t lived yet?
It twisted my brain, thinking of time like this. As squiggles and loops rather than a straight line. But as I connected the dots, it started to make sense.
There was one way to test if time travel still worked, but I did not want to waste the precious time I had. I needed to pick the right moment. To fix this. For good.
Though, if history was fixed … But I had to try. I picked at the seams of all the events leading up to now, trying to pull out the stuffing. What was I missing? What thread could I follow that would convince the strid to give up Kessian?
I’d once asked the wraith, “What do you want?”
To go home.
But where was home? Grandad had alienated his own children in favor of his grandkids. My mum resented me and pushed me out to preserve the rest of the family. Marlowe had broken us for the sake of an inheritance and his own pride. The houses we lived in were haunted, the very waters flowing through Shearwater were drenched in blood, and the rest of it belonged to Warwick.
Everyone in this town clung so hard to each other and the past that when they’d been pulled apart, their claws tore great rifts in their futures.
It struck me then. We’d explored all the mysterious deaths in the strid. All but two.
When we’d examined the death glow left by the wraith on my grandfather’s body, there’d been two names amongst the others. Mine and Kessian’s, yet neither of us had died. Neither of us had merged with the wraith.
Yet.
As I heard Laurelie burst into tears, I touched the dial on the side of the spectral watch and turned it back, uncertain it would work until the wedding melted away, replaced by Lunaris’s kitchen.
Through a gap in the bedroom door, I could see Kessian and I wrapped around each other, making the bed creak.
I’d lived this moment, but I still felt as though I’d intruded as I quietly stepped outside and closed the door to give them—us—privacy.
