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Blair reached inside his coat pocket and handed the man a stack of bills. He felt a bit concerned about the exuberant cost. Still, he hadn’t wanted to put Gabriel out by accepting his offer to drive them, and Iris’ Nissan wouldn’t have been up to the trip. He would have to make learning how to drive a priority for the near future.

The moment Blair lifted their overnight bags out of the trunk and snapped it closed, the driver pulled away, his tires spinning against the salt-crusted ice as he rounded a corner and was gone.

Blair led the way down the driveway, avoiding the icy patches in the center and refusing Iris’ attempts to carry her own belongings, a bag slung over each of his shoulders. The pallid blue sky seemed to darken as they stepped deeper into the trees. The tips of the pines bent low over their heads, dripping snow onto their knit hats and down the collars of their jackets. There was less snow by the coast than in Vitford, but what little there was squelched like waterlogged clay beneath their feet. After a few minutes, the wrought iron gate became visible in the distance, shrouded in the thick mist that drifted off the sea.

When he’d arrived home after being recovered from the witch’s clutches all those years ago, Blair hadn’t realized that he would be trading one kind of cage for another. Yet, when the iron bars were first installed around his family home, he’d found the assurance of safety comforting. Perhaps that shouldn’t have come as a surprise; while in captivity, the cage had been his only refuge. Inside those bars he had been relatively safe. It was when he was forced to leave his confinement so the witch could perform her spells that he had been subjected to the most severe cruelty.

He’d come to associate cages with safety just as much as with confinement, and exiting them with imminent danger. He knew that was one of the reasons he’d stayed behind these iron bars for so very long before finally feeling strong enough to leave them behind.

Blair came to an abrupt stop, causing Iris to nearly bump into him. “There’s something you should know before we see my parents,” he admitted with difficulty. Iris took a step closer, and Blair reached out to steady her as her boots skidded on a patch of glare ice. “The nightmares that I told you about…” He sighed, his numb fingers finding his ring without conscious thought. “They aren’t just nightmares. They’re a result of something that happened to me in the early 1800’s.”

He motioned for her to keep walking, his hand sliding into hers as he led her closer to the gate. “While home alone one day, I was forced onto a carriage by a masked stranger and transported many miles away. I was blindfolded, but I could feel the presence of someone else in the carriage with me. I could hear her cries.” He inhaled a deep lungful of cold, seaweed-scented air. “Lucy.”

Iris’ warm chocolate eyes were full of compassion. As usual, Blair found it hard to accept her solicitude. He kept his attention trained on the ground, guiding her further into the tree line as they reached another patch slick with ice.

“We were thrown into cages. Everything was damp and dark. We were in some kind of cellar. No blankets, no change of clothes. Twice a day, scraps were thrown in for us to eat, like we were animals. To her, I suppose we were.” Humiliated tears stung his eyes, but Blair let the ocean breeze wick away the moisture. “There was a witch. I can still see her when I close my eyes. I can smell the blood, I can hear…”

His breath caught, and he forced his feet to carry him onward. He knew he was a moment away from tumbling backward into those awful memories, a cavern he might not be able to climb back out of. They were nearing the gate now. Iris remained silent, waiting for him to speak.

“I can hear the creak the un-oiled hinges made each time she opened our cages,” Blair continued, his voice low as he tried to find the words to describe such a visceral experience. “The pull at the center of my chest as she used her magic to force us from our confinement. The first several days, she asked me questions, demanding that I tell her the exact process my mother had taken to make my father immortal. I told her over and over again that I didn’t know. She wouldn’t believe me, and she punished me for it. She used her magic to push us to our limits, to torture us. Sometimes, it felt like it would never end.” Blair gazed into the distance, lost in the haze of the past. Lately, the memories seemed so close, like they had happened last year rather than two centuries ago.

“Oh, Blair.” Iris came to a halt beside him. She reached for his other hand and held both of them tightly in her own, as though if she could gather him close, she could protect him from the haunts of his past.

“The ring is Lucy’s,” Blair said, blinking rapidly as he stared down at it. “It fell off on the day she…” He swallowed, his face clenched. “After…”

But he knew from the way Iris pulled him into a tight embrace that she understood. He sighed as he held her close, letting her warmth block out the chill of the sea air and the past he’d never been able to fully break free from.

Those weeks in the witch’s captivity had sealed Blair’s fate, cementing his terror at the prospect of ever leaving home. It wasn’t only the concern that he might lose control and hurt someone that had held him back; there was also the fear—however irrational—that his old enemies might re-emerge as if from the primordial ooze, that his good luck might someday fail and lead him back into the clutches of someone who would try to use his condition against him.

“How did you escape?” Iris whispered, pulling back a little to look at him.

Blair had spent so long trying to recall the face of his rescuer, but it was impossible, a detail lost to time and to the confused terror that had clouded his memory after Lucy’s death.

“Not long after she was killed, someone let me out of the cage and put me on a carriage that returned me to my family.”

He squared his shoulders and started down the driveway again, Iris at his side. Unasked questions shone in the depths of her eyes, but she seemed to understand that Blair had said all he was comfortable with for the moment, and she remained silent as they reached the wrought iron gate, which leered down at them, gargantuan and imposing.

Blair was unsurprised when he typed in the old passcode and the gate began to move apart at once. He had been right in thinking that his mother wouldn’t want to regularly change the passcode as she normally did, on the off chance he decided to return. He would need to make it perfectly clear that this was a visit. He would most certainly not be staying.

Iris tensed as she watched the gate groan open, leaving a gaping chasm for them to walk through.

“Are you ready?” Blair asked gently.

Her eyes on the final bend in the driveway that separated them from Saltonstall house, Iris gave a single nod.

26

As the red colonial’s door swung open, Blair watched a dozen emotions flicker across his mother’s face in the split second it took her to gasp out his name and draw him into a bone-breaking hug, his and Iris’ bags tumbling onto the flagstones.

He was aware of the stiffness in his limbs as he held her back, feeling a mixture of relief and unease at the sight of her. “Hello, Mother.”

His mother cupped his cheeks in her cool hands, her identical gray eyes roving over his face. He glanced away, disconcerted. “How are you?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly. “Have they been treating you well?”

Blair felt a stab of annoyance at the question. She made it sound as though he’d been languishing in some sort of long-term care facility. Mutely, he nodded, and she wrapped her arm around his shoulders and marched him through the entryway.

The familiar earthy, sage and woodsmoke-scented air met Blair’s senses, almost making him woozy with the rush of memories it conjured. The staircase with its curved cherry-wood banister, the rocking chair situated to his left just inside the sitting room, even the elegant knot of his mother’s auburn hair—everything was the same.

The one thing that had changed, the only variable that didn’t quite belong, Blair realized with a jolt, was himself.