“Who’s to say I haven’t already? Look at how I live. What more could I possibly wish for?”
Liar, trickster, murderer by proxy, hissed the strid, while I railed against it. This was the wrong place, the wrong time. I had already taken the contract from the safe, and there was nothing else to glean.
The memory threw me from its back like a bucking horse. I landed back in the waters, both familiar and alien. A part of me and not. It was difficult to remember why that was, or what I’d been doing here. The water whisperedstay, stay, stay, but I didn’t want to. I resented the thing that kept me here, that had stolen something from me.
Someone.
Through the erosion of my self, I conjured Kessian’s face. The memories of him didn’t arrive fuzzily or in rapid bursts. They absorbed me, gluey and sticking to my heart.
Before I could narrow down the memory I needed to arrive in, the world resolved around me, and I was in a bedroom.
Two people slept on either side of the bed, with a gap between them of only a half foot, but it could have been a gulf.
Kessian was curled up on his side, facing Tal.Me, I tried to remind myself.That’s me.
Mine now.
Had that been my thought or the strid’s? The possessive sentiment rotted through the already spongy barrier between us. I found myself clambering through the fabric of the Bloodstream and the real world, slipping into the bed with Kessian. A combination of missing him and muscle memory had me putting my arms around him, as the figure across the bed stiffened.
Me. That’s me, I reminded myself.
Kessian’s hair smelled like oranges, and he was so warm, and the water was so cold. I could take him right now. Take him into the Bloodstream so we’d never be apart.
Then Tal—Ipunched the wraith, which was also me. I fell back, screeching, and another part of me, a different part (Laurelie? Is that Laurelie?) saw her brother’s face and raised fists. She recoiled, and like a collared dog we were pulled back into the Bloodstream from whence we’d come.
Shearwater’s memories flooded me again, but this time I clung hard to the one of Kessian warm in my arms. That sensation still lingeredthrough the cloak of shadows. I’d held him like that on the night I needed to get back to.
Please, take me there, to that time, to that place.
The world righted itself once more, countless memories becoming one.
I hovered like a ghost on the ceiling of Tal’s bedroom.Mybedroom.
Relief clutched my heart in its fist. Kessian had just given me the glass of water with the dregs of a sleep draft in it. I saw the magic sprinkle like sand in my eyes. They drooped shut. I slumped into the pillow. Kessian let out a soft noise of despair as he kissed my forehead for what he thought would be the last time and whispered, “Forgive me.”
Don’t go, I wanted to scream, but I consoled myself that I’d found the right memory. I’d come to the right time.
As Kessian wrote a note, Lunaris began to blare her horn. Kessian hissed at her to be quiet, but she slammed doors instead. He hurried to get dressed. He grabbed his cane and headed for the front door. She tried to lock him inside, but he slid a knife up the crack to unbolt the door.
He looked down the hall toward me. A tear glistened like a falling star amongst the freckles of his cheeks. It took visible effort for him to turn and go.
Lunaris redoubled her efforts to wake me. It would not be long now that she would.
Before we’d first met, he’d been a ghost who fished me out of a river and saved my life.
Now I crept from Lunaris’s roof into the woods and waited, a ghost hell-bent on saving him in return.
Moments later, my past self came racing out the front door. The sound of my own voice was always alien in videos and answering machine messages, but even more so now when I could hear my own heart breaking.
As one version of me pelted across the lawn toward Kessian, the other skulked out of the shadows. Through the trees, I kept Kessian in my sights, and the madman chasing after him barefoot.
Then I gave chase, too.
It was strange, remembering their terror. I’d lived it. Now, I experienced the eerie calm of carrying out the past like an actor playing his part, knowing where it led but not how it ended. Trusting that I would find a way to make things right when I got there.
I ran through the trees, up to the bank of the spring and slipped into the water, where Kessian waited for me on the surface.
The moment I submerged, my mind started to bleed. It hemorrhaged into the water, sucked out by the all-consuming strid and its corrupted magic. My desire tosavebecame a compulsion topossess. I tried to curb it, but the instincts tore through. I dragged Kessian under.
