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Rev nods, swallowing hard, and I turn to where the vampire is waiting for me to look at his discovery.

“Here,” Dezi says, pointing at a patch of crystal unlike the rest. The lattice is denser, and inside the structure are little glyphs—ancient and thorny. “These sigils are binding marks. This isn’t just a room; it’s a repository.”

“For what?” I ask as I study it. “And why did the maze send us here of all places in this pocket place or whatever.”

My mate traces one symbol with his nail, careful not to touch the glass. “Memories, bloodlines… that’s often what such a thing would hold. In magical repositories, every shard is a record of something and it’s stored there for a reason.”

I move closer, peering into the structure as if squinting will help me understand. For a second, my reflection is doubled: one face, two sets of eyes, one mine and the other a little older, a little sharper. The moment I blink, it’s gone.

Oh, shit. It can’t be.

Tier moves behind me, pausing his search, and when he speaks it’s with the low, careful cadence of someone trying not to lose their shit. “If this place is about memories, what happens if we touch the wrong one?”

The vamp’s smile is smug. “That’s why we let the witchling touch it first. Not our normal modus operandi, I know, but none of us have any skin in the game when it comes to Midnight Court memories. Thus, it must be her.”

I roll my eyes, but his point stands. There’s an inevitability to learning the truth about my past, now that I can no longer outrun it. What happened to my mother has been distilled through others, but if this is somehow connected to her, I might see what really happened.

Damn the torpedoes and all that, it’s time.

Reaching out with my palm up, I let my hand hover just above the crystal. The mark on my hand pulses, and the nearest branch vibrates, then blooms with light—first white, then violet, then blue so deep it looks like the end of the world.

Here we go…

A scene explodes into life inside the crystal, more real than any vision I’ve ever had. A woman—tall, sharp-boned and with hair like shining onyx threaded with silver—runs down a corridor made of shadows. In her arms is a small bundle wrapped tightly and being clutched, as if losing it would end the universe. She looks back once, and her eyes are the same as mine. The air behind her is full of screams; not just screams, but blood-curdling nightmarish shrieks of pain and suffering.

She hits a wall of black stone, its surface crawling with sigils, and slaps her palm to it. The mark on her hand is the same as mine, but brighter, more detailed, and crawling up her arms like badass tattoos. The wall splits, and she shoves the bundle through with a tortured wail. Once it closes, she turns and faces the darkness, her hands out and glowing as the shadows surge forward.

Then the vision collapses, and the crystal goes black.

I jerk my hand back. My pulse is a sledgehammer, and there’s sweat dripping down my spine.

This damn maze just showed my mother saving my life at the expense of her own, like a movie trailer for everyone—and now I can’t deny a damn thing Morana said.

Twenty

DEZI

In every age of humans, there’s a broadly accepted lie about memory.

For example, people once said it is a window, not a snare; another group said time spent watching the past cannot change you. This is comforting fiction for creatures who age rapidly. In opposition, for those supernaturals who persist past these short lifespans or for those who possess immortality, memory is a system of locked boxes, each one locked away by a different, less careful version of yourself, so that you can reinvent yourself over and over.

Briarvale is a place where we do not have to do that, as it’s almost entirely populated by our kind. I chose to move to such a location after many versions of myself died, as our coven moved around the globe throughout the centuries. At that time, I was weary of the ‘vampiric hedonism’ lifestyle and definitely ready to be as far from my sire as possible. Being in Faerie, where it is also completely natural for us all to be free with ourselves, has been helpful to my mate and our family as a whole.

But this trial is opening boxes in my mind that I wanted to stay locked for eternity, and I do not like it.

This crystalline abattoir is saturated in centuries of magical panic and fear, each one clawing to be remembered. It’s also brimming with false prophecies, as the witchling said, in order to compel its victims to resign. Those are tricks my kind enjoys, and the parallel to the Fae who built this monstrosity and my sire’s breaking techniques is not lost on me. I do not know why they would want to risk destroying their royal progeny in Midnight, but I know what the end result of this will be. They will have a leader that cannot be broken if captured and will not hesitate to do anything to glorify their Court.

Our witchling is capable of such ferocity, and I believe she can do it without losing her soul as the current royals have. However, I am not certain if she wants to accept that mantle—not entirely—and if she does, she will also have to sacrifice other things she has not considered yet. Our family would follow her to the depths, no matter what ties we have to loosen, but she has to decide that her newfound destiny is what she wants.

I will not allow anyone, including the shadowy Council, to force it upon her; Fiadh will never be forced to bend to anyone again as long as I breathe.

Watching her as she tries to reconcile her latest vision, I note her palm’s blue crescent now pulsing hard enough to light the room up. Every time she steadies herself, her magic bucks and another layer of crystal ignites. First the walls glow with a steady undertone of red, then violet, and finally, an entire spectrum of colors that are blinding. Another door opens in the wall she slapped, and I groan under my breath.

This place feels never-ending, and our witchling has not had centuries of training to survive it—at least, not that she has unlocked.

Our prince is first to take her arm and support her. He looks down at Fi and murmurs, “You saw your mother, right?”

She nods, swallowing hard. “The night she was killed and sent me through a portal.”