He stopped resisting me, grumbling, “It would feel very good to punch him in the face, though.”
“You really hate him, don’t you?”
Kessian grimaced. “He’s been raising my rent without giving me a pay raise at the spa for the past six years, and then he evicted me. He’s the most poisonous person in Shearwater. If the wraith had drowned him it would have fixed half the town’s problems.”
I paused in the foyer. We had to wait until my past self snuck upstairs to unlock the door. “Why do you say that?”
“Hm?”
“That’s just a very specific choice in words, ‘poisonous person.’ Did you mean it like that? That getting rid of him somehow could be the real antidote to this problem?”
“Yes … and no.” He frowned, walking past me to the display case with the wraith statue inside. Now I’d made the connection, the antlers looked less like antlers than a musical instrument. A strange one, yes, with so many tines, but where they all connected was clearly a mouthpiece, and the holes in each hollow tine would control the note. To have it flagrantly on display …
He wasn’t the one who’d used it, though. My uncle’s saliva could still be on the mouthpiece, his fingerprints on the tines.
“I keep coming back to this idea of home,” Kessian said. “When Shearwater chose me, it asked me what I wanted, and I told it I wanted a home. Now all Shearwater wants is to go home, too.”
“That still makes no sense to me. How can it? It’s a place.”
“Wild magic doesn’t come from the usual tithes witches use. It comes from less tangible things. Things big as love and small as the feeling of putting your feet up after a hard day’s work. I think some wild magic comes from feelings we don’t have names for anymore. And I think Shearwater’s is like that. It … it needs to be a home, and have a home, to make its magic.”
I didn’t like how it made abstract sense. Abstract problems required subjective solutions. This wasn’t math, I couldn’t solve for “z” and come up with the same answer as the next person. “Well, that complicates things. Couldn’t have just been bitten by a snake and given an antivenom.”
Kessian’s lip quirked. He held up the watch, which had lost another hour.
On schedule, my past self speed-walked down the hall, turning sharply to go up the stairs. We followed close behind, watching him rendezvous with past Kessian and charm the lock open.
Courtesy of the sheer size of Foxbury Manor, it wasn’t difficult to follow them inside without bumping into anything. While they were busy unlocking and rifling through the filing cabinets, we focused on the safe.
“Do you remember the combination?” I asked.
“I thought you did.”
“You’re the one whose hand was guided through it.”
“Yes, I was quite distracted by the ghostly touch of my future self and neglected to write it down.”
“Well, we have to know what it is, or this wouldn’t have worked in the past.”
“Do you know Warwick’s birthday?”
I groaned. Our past selves were making their way around the room, getting closer to the side of the desk where the safe was visible.
Kessian tapped his finger against the pocket watch as he tried to recall. I sifted through the memories of the past few days, wondering if we’d evercome across a number combination. The trip to Coill Darragh, speaking to my grandfather’s ghost, the autopsy—the past week was a blur.
Our past selves noticed the safe and moved in.
Kessian backed up to give them space, tapping more rapidly. “Shit. It’s like they’re on the tip of my tongue.”
Or at the tip of his fingers. “Kessian. The watch. They were in the watch.”
He flicked it open, and there they were on the lid.
34-96-13
He smacked a kiss to my cheek. “You’re so smart and beautiful.”
Without preamble, he leaned awkwardly over his past self, guiding him by the hand to input the numbers, leaving me in the pleasant daze of being kissed and complimented so casually. We hadn’t had the time to talk about the kiss at Fae’s wedding, or what should have come after. With our lives on the line, our relationship wasn’t a priority, but the graze of Kessian’s lips reassured me that what he’d said hadn’t been a dream.
