“You’re a story I’d want to see through to the end, even if I knew the ending was tragic.”
I fervently hoped it wouldn’t be.
The safe clicked open, the door swinging to reveal the sheafs of papers, including a contract conspicuously covered in runes and sigils.
The sound of Warwick’s encroaching familiar distracted our past selves, allowing us the opportunity to take the contract. If they’d been watching would they have seen it vanish into the ether? Or would their minds play a trick and insist it was never there to begin with?
Retreating with our prize, we huddled to read it, but the strid, sensing we’d got what we came for, began to pull us away from the memory. The pocket watch emitted an ominousTICK TOCK, the study blurred, and we tumbled out of the study, back into the Bloodstream.
Kessian rubbed his sore hip and glared up at the sky. “I miss beds and soft furnishings and blankets and hot water bottles and baths.” He appraised the time on the pocket watch and winced. “Another two hours gone. How is each memory stealing so much time?”
I didn’t know, but we didn’t have much to spare for sitting and poring over the contract. Kessian gave me half the stack of papers, mostly theones covered in symbols he couldn’t read as a non-witch. It didn’t take long to derive a few conclusions.
“It’s a magical nondisclosure agreement attached to the temporary loan of the … the ‘bone flute.’ It says here, Marlowe had permission to use it for the specified time frame it was on loan, but under the condition that any adverse effects of its usage would be his sole responsibility.”
Kessian snorted. “Adverse effects? It lures people to their deaths. He aided and abetted a murderer.”
“Unless Marlowe didn’t know what the bone flute did. The contract makes no mention of its effects.” It was a paltry hope but felt easier to forgive than malice.
“Maybe.” Kessian didn’t sound convinced.
“Whatever his reasons, it still brings us no closer to identifying an antidote for the poison. The consequences of this contract hadn’t come to pass when it was drafted.”
“Keep it safe. We’ll need it to prove Marlowe’s involvement. For now, where do we go next?”
I dreaded the answer, but there were two mysteries as yet unsolved, and I couldn’t conceive of how we’d identify the cure for the poison unless we explored the symptoms.
Unfortunately, the symptoms all seemed to involve the deaths of my family members.
“I think we have to go back to the day my grandad died.”
Chapter 34
Though Grandad didn’t have a clock labeled for himself, it stood to reason his would be the grandfather clock in the front hall, but with the pocket watch cheating us out of an hour here, two hours there, an entirely different problem presented itself.
“I don’t know his exact time of death. If we arrive the morning of, but he only died in the evening, we could run out of time before we even see the murder.”
Kessian glanced warily at the spiteful pocket watch, ticking away the last hours of our lives. “It seems to skip time faster when we jump between memories. Let’s arrive at noon on the day he died. If he’s already gone, we skip back twelve hours. If not … we wait.”
It was as close to an estimated guess as we could get. I nodded in agreement, and we faced down the grandfather clock. The pendulums ticked ominously as we opened the glass face to change the hands.
Kessian said, “Are you ready?”
No.“Let’s get it over with.”
He input the time and date.Gong. Gong.The clock chimed loudly once, twice, thrice …
On the twelfth, the hallway metamorphosed. Shelves and new clocks grew from the walls like moss and lichen. The wallpaper yellowed with age. When it had finished, silence fell, except for the incessant ticking and the sound of muttering from the living room.
We entered to find Grandad with a mug of tea in one hand, a newspaper in the other. It was dated nine years ago, the headline covering the shame of Shearwater’s high street and its falling fortunes. He had it open to the obituaries.
He was still here like he’d never died.
I jumped as Kessian’s fingers threaded through mine. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, fine. Looks like he’s reading up on every death in Shearwater around the time everyone got taken.”
“Probably hoping for a clue as to what really happened,” Kessian said. “I imagine by now new leads were fairly threadbare.”
