My own resentment bubbled up. The strid demanded to know with righteous fury,How was my desperate refusal to say goodbye to Kessian any different from the strid clinging to its residents?
The song in my ears fumed. My argument fell on deaf ears. What did I know? When I was just the same.
The briny water boiled in my lungs, turned my veins to tributaries. I tasted smoke and salt and silt. Shadows condensed and clothed me as an ache in my head reached such a peak, I thought it was splitting open like a seed sprouting. My fingers lengthened into claws. My knuckles popped. When I exhaled, instead of bubbles, a stream of ink weaved through the water.
I struggled, swam toward a reflection of light rippling on the surface, but when I moved I felt like a passenger.
I emerged on the banks of the spring once more, but I was not myself. Shadows pooled around my feet. Antlers weighed heavy on my skull.
I was the wraith.
Chapter 42
My limbs were corded and dripping ichor. The shadows licked around me like flames. I looked down at myself and did not recognize what I saw. I’d come into this prepared. If I was right about how everything ended, then I had to become this to make that ending happy.
But as I turned and beheld my reflection in the spring’s glossy pool, my stomach roiled.
That wasn’tme.
The strid echoed that sentiment in its own, susurrous language. I glimpsed images of the spring in its full power, when fireflies danced in the reeds and the water lit with glowing nebulas of magic. Blue, not crimson. Back when it had been loved, not used and abandoned.
Those feelings burrowed like termites in my mind. The strid eroded the barrier between us. Ate holes in my brain. Making us more and more alike, trying to make me forget.
But the sight of my reflection reminded me.
That wasn’t me.
That wasn’t my face.
Was this how Kessian once felt whenever he looked in the mirror?
Kessian.
That’s why I’d come here. That’s why I looked like this. I needed to purify the strid so Kessian and I could go home.
Home. You are home.
I resisted that thought. It wasn’t mine, either.
I needed to find my way back to the Bloodstream, back to the memory where we’d been separated.
Which of us had been separated? The strid from Laurelie? Me from Kessian? Both? My memories and the strid’s threatened to emulsify. I had to keep them separate. Oil and water.
The Bloodstream, I reminded myself. Kessian. I had to get back to Kessian.
Before, I’d needed to twist the hands of the clocks at 37 Culpepper Avenue to dip in and out of time, but as I tried to remember how, the strid pulled on my bones like a fell wind, dragging me another way, as though I’d slipped on an icy patch in my mind. I found myself skidding—not toward Culpepper Avenue, but back into the waters of the spring.
I dove into the deep, into the mulch, the bedrock, squeezing through crevasses into the underground tributaries, the veins of the strid. I could swim upstream against the current now, because Iwasthe strid. I had a map of the cartography and knew every turn, every tunnel. I used it to slip between the cracks of this world into the Bloodstream.
It was like being plunged into a matrix of memories, none of them my own. Everything the strid knew and had borne witness to. All the things that hadn’t come to pass, but could. All the things currently happening.
(My mum is screaming on the phone to police while Camilla puts her arms around Fae, ushering them into the kitchen, where Amelia butters toast for them.)
These weren’t the memories I needed. There was a specific one.
The strid’s instincts and mine warred with each other. It wanted to keep everyone here. I wanted to set Kessian free. When one memory caught me like a riptide, I couldn’t tell whether it was the one I or the strid had aimed for until it dumped me into the conservatory at Foxbury Manor, where instead of making me tea, Warwick served a younger Uncle Marlowe, who held the bone flute in his hands with quiet awe and some suspicion.
“If it grants wishes like you claim, why haven’t you used it?”
