“Now you,” he hissed to Leah, who pulled out a hair with a shaky hand and gave it to him.
He nibbled on the end of that one too and shook his head. “Imbecile, novice, magic users trying to be powerful…”
“Excuse me!” Leah said, offended.
His gaze flicked to hers and there was a harshness there. Not one of maliciousness but one of a teacher scolding a student.
“The curse the Fae Lords put on was one of exquisite beauty that had no place being taken off so quickly. It looks like a kindergartener did it,” he growled. “At this rate, you will both have amnesia in five years.”
Leah and I both stilled, chills racing up our arms. “What?” we asked in unison.
“What do you mean?” Brayden and Castiel both stepped forward at once.
The air in the house had changed. We’d come here to get a curse removed but now it seemed we were getting bad news.
The fae narrowed his eyes at the king of the Greywolves. “Whoever disrupted this curse didn’t properly get rid of it. They broke it and it’s mending itself back together in a way that makes itself a new curse entirely.”
I felt the room sway around me as my palms slicked with sweat.
“Can you fix it?” Brayden asked him. “Can you remove the curse entirely so that it’s like it was never there?”
The fae frowned, his eyes scanning over me and Leah. It wasn’t in a creepy way, more like he was looking at something unseen around us. The curse?
“I can, but it will strip the past life memories,” he confirmed. “They will only remember this life.”
The collective gasp from Brayden, Castiel, Leah and I was heartbreaking. A tangible pain simmered in the air. All of our lives together… marriages, my sisters, my other parents. My memory of marrying Brayden and the chocolates.
I wept then, unable to hold in the sorrow that was filling the emptiness inside of me.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I wasn’t expecting you to say that.”
The fae shifted uncomfortably and Brayden came up behind me, wrapping his arms around me from behind. When his lips came to my ear, he whispered softly, “We will make new memories, my love.”
It was in that moment that I knew one hundred percent that he’d chosen me for me and that he loved me for me. I wanted to tell him I loved him too but now wasn’t the time. I simply nodded.
Castiel whispered something to Leah as well. She wiped her stray tears, and after a moment we faced the fae.
A thought struck me then. “Brayden, we won’t be able to restore your power. Wren will have no memory of it.”
Brayden hadn’t seemed to consider this yet. His face fell but Erwin interrupted. “There will be a small moment, maybe thirty seconds, where both girls remember everything, combined. It will feel like they are both Wren and Lena. In that moment, the knowledge to restore your power should come to them.”
“So if we restore his power before the memories fade away, his power will be back?” I asked.
Erwin nodded. “But then you’ll lose it all, forever.”
“Understood,” I said.
“And if we do nothing?” Leah piped in.
Erwin looked at us both sullenly. “Then you won’t even know your own name in five years.”
If it was our only chance, then we’d need to take it. “Let’s do it.”
Everyone looked around at each other and nodded in agreement.
There was a somberness to Erwin now. Maybe he didn’t understand what he was asking before, but deleting all of our collective memories was like taking out an organ, and he seemed to understand that now.
He looked at Morgana with disdain. “I assume you’re here because you knew I would need your services to help with this?”
