Rescue, I reminded myself. He wasn’t an object, a piece of decoration to trick people into thinking you’d made your house a home.
I could hear my own muffled voice screaming underwater. I released Kessian’s ankle. I had him now. Mine. The waters embraced and held him up. He floated in the murk, eyes wide and terrified as I circled in.
Take, take, mine, can’t leave, can’t go, can’t let him be taken.
I reached out, wrapping a claw around Kessian’s neck. Yes. If we took him here and now, he could never leave. Not Shearwater, not me.
Those aren’t my thoughts. This isn’t me.
I tried to shake the strid’s jealous refrain from my head. Kessian’s fingers were digging through the shadows at my wrists, trying to pry my claw from his neck, and he looked—
Horrified. Scared for his life.
And resigned.
He was doing this to spare me. So thatIcould live. Because he cared for me.
A few memories parted the endless deluge of them. Kessian comforting me in a claustrophobic changing room. Revealing his secrets one by one. Leaving marks on each other’s lives like a door the color of baked cherries, clay fingerprints on skin, a love bite from all the times I’d kissed his neck.
I didn’t need to possess him. These moments were enough.
The strid’s memories had felt like hail stones pitted against my own, but now they softened. The strid paused, and my mind felt like my own.
My hand around Kessian’s throat transformed into an apologetic caress. I tipped my head forward and fought to speak.
“It’s me. It’s Tal.”
Kessian’s gaze was a eulogy of terror, hurt, yearning and, just below the surface, hope.
“I went back in time. It was me stealing the hours from us. I took Laurelie’s place, but I can’t purify the strid on my own. It keeps takingme over. It twists my feelings. Makes them selfish, and I’m too selfish to stop it.”
Kessian looked prepared to protest.
I rushed to say the rest. I could feel the strid trying to reassert itself. “I think we have to purify it together.”
I tried to say more, but the strid stole my voice, choked me silent. I feared for a moment I hadn’t said enough to convince him, but then Kessian nodded, turned to his right, and mouthed the words. “Trust me.” And then, “This isn’t goodbye.”
I don’t know why I’d been afraid. I knew he would agree because he already had. In the moment, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like trying to catch a pebble in a riptide.
Kessian surrendered to me. I tried to be delicate, but the strid was rattling its way to the surface. I leaned in to kiss him, but my claws pulled his mouth open.
The wraith, Kessian, and I melted into one. A few memories pricked to the surface, ones I’d lived from the other side. Kessian’s memories.
Now it was my foot on the pedal of the pottery wheel with big hands leaving clay marks on my skin, a body bracketing mine, warm against my back.
Then I was lying sweaty in bed while soft lips and a rough mustache kissed my knuckles, and my heart beat so fast and my head spun from how good it felt to be wanted like this, devoured by hazel green eyes, my body not a peculiarity but a source of pleasure for us both. And he said to me, “I’m done with running away. You’re worth the risk.”
“The risk of what?” I said.
He said, “A broken heart.”
And mine, which had been pounding so, so fast, froze, as a tidal wave of recollection swept me under. Mum making me chili for dinner (my favorite) to soften the blow of breaking the news she was selling our council house so she could travel the world with a backpack, but without me. Miriam holding my hand telling me she was proud I’d found myself, but she couldn’t love who I’d become. Dom filling up his car and driving off without saying goodbye after asking for one last lay like I was a toy he was close to retiring.
I looked into those hazel green eyes and thought,Oh no.This is going to hurt.
The wrongness of it shook me out of the memories.Iwas Tal. And I didn’t know what the future held, but I hadn’t left him yet, and I didn’t intend to anytime soon.
I was here, now, trying to get him back.
