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“Vintage?”
She shook her head. “I see places I’ve never been. Don’t worry about it.”
“How do you know you’ve never been there, if you can’t remember your past?”
“Because I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t alive during the thirties. Or the Victorian era. Or lived in a castle.” I’m pretty sure, anyway. The doubt needled at her. If what Rinaldo said was true…maybe she had been.
It was so tempting to believe it. She wanted to believe she wasn’t insane—that maybe there was a bizarre supernatural explanation for her broken mind, and she wasn’t just too weak to deal with her trauma.
But that also meant that the handsome and kind psychiatrist who was currently marveling over her drawings was a threat to her life. Or un-life. Or whatever she was in that scenario. Gideon seemed eccentric, but…she didn’t know if he was dangerous.
Either option wasn’t great. Either she was nuts, or magic was real, and the man next to her was responsible for her condition.
He was still staring down at the drawing of the creature from her hallucination—from her nightmares. “Perhaps these places link to your past.” He finally turned the page. “If you can draw some of these places you see, maybe I can help you locate them.”
“Why?”
“If we take you to these places, perhaps it will trigger some kind of awakening. You might remember more of yourself.” He turned the page again. This time, the drawing was of an old tombstone from somewhere else in the yard they were sitting in. The skull with wings was a particularly puritan image. They were on nearly every headstone she could see. Some also had hourglasses with wings, or cherub heads. It all meant the same thing. Tempus Fugit; Memento Mori.
Time Flies; Remember Death.
“Puritans, man. Serious buzzkills.” She leaned back against the tree and turned her attention back out to the rows of haphazard tombstones. Each one was unique in its own right. Some were tilted and sunken or leaning on each other. Most were in remarkably good condition for their age. Slate held up to the rigors of a New England winter, but several of the slate slabs had split and flaked away or grown moss over the years, removing any evidence of who had been placed beneath them so long ago.
“The imminent threat of death will do that to you, I suppose.” Gideon reached the end of her sketches and closed the pad of paper to hand it back to her. He rested against the tree and sipped his coffee. “They had short, miserable lives. Their only hope was that the ever-after brought them the promise of something more. Tell me, princess, why do you like this place so much? I see you out here now and then.”
“I’m not sure. It’s peaceful to me.”
“How so?”
She shrugged. “All I can remember is dying. Again, and again, and again. And it’s terrifying. But…these people have been there. Done that. They’re dead. Dying can’t be that scary if so many people have done it, right? I don’t know. I guess I feel a weird…solidarity with that. I feel like they understand me.” She paused. “Now I really do sound insane.”
“Not at all, I promise you. Is there anything else?”
She thought about it for a moment. “For most of these people, a name on a piece of slate shoved into the ground is all anybody remembers of them. That’s all that’s left. But it’s not just the person who was buried there. Look.” She pointed at a stone near them. “You can see the dash lines of the artist who carved it. They scratched straight lines to help line up their letters. And those little scratches are still there. And over there, you can see where the artist screwed up and flipped the stone over to start again. There’s a half-finished carving on the back.” She smiled. “It’s…human. When I go to the Museum of Fine Arts and I look at the stuff from Ancient Egypt, it doesn’t seem real. It’s so old. But those things, the…chisel marks. The mistakes. It helps you remember that they were people. They’re dead, but in those chisel marks, I feel connected to them. They aren’t gone.”
“A beautiful sentiment.”
“Not really.” She smirked halfheartedly. “Just the ramblings of a lunatic.”
“I agree with you.”
“That I’m a lunatic?” She shot him a look teasingly.
He laughed, a deep rumble. She liked his laugh. “No, no. That graveyards provide a certain amount of peace. That here, we can reflect upon our place and our mortality. In such places, we may reflect upon our own troubles and understand how small they truly are. That all things, in turn, must pass.”
“Now that is a beautiful sentiment. Dr. Gideon Raithe, poet, psychiatrist, and snappy dresser.”
He laughed again. Shutting his eyes, he smiled. “I’m many things, I’m afraid. A poet is not one of them.”
“Could have fooled me.” Oh, lord, she was so tempted just to ask him. “Hey, Gideon? Are you an ancient and powerful necromancer who raised me from the dead for whatever reason? Just curious.” She really wanted to ask. She wondered what he’d say. Laugh at her, maybe. Double up her prescriptions, most definitely.
Suddenly, she realized she didn’t want to know the answer. If he said no, that meant Rinaldo was either a hallucination or another lunatic. It meant there was no silly supernatural excuse for her insanity.
If he said yes?
Pretty sure all hell would break loose at that point.
She didn’t know which was worse. It was better not to know. And until she asked—assuming he told her the truth—he was both and neither. And that was much better than if the answer was yes or no.
