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All around us, I felt the forest and the hills around it. And at its center—the darkness. The black that blotted out the endless stars. I could feel Bryony, too, and the wonder that shone in her when she saw the dark soul.
“Now look,” she said. I opened my eyes. She tilted my chin up with one finger, and I gazed through a gap in the roof at the buckshot stars that gleamed above us. “You are the night sky, Helen. Dark and wondrous and vast. We can only see part of it, but you can’t carve a sliver of it out and carry it in your pocket. You cannot cut part of yourself free.”
“But the Other isn’t the stars. It’s the shadow that hides the stars,” I said.
“There is no shadow,” Bryony said gently. “There’s just the stars, and the ones you can’t see.”
Is that what I was seeing? A void? A part of myself obscured? It was the migraine haze, floating in my vision. “I don’t want to be the stars or the sky or any of it. I just want to be normal,” I said. I dropped my hands from hers. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Then don’t,” Bryony said. She put her hand against my chest. “I told you. We choose who we are. You more than any of us.”
“What if I chose to be someone else? Someone you didn’t love?” I asked her.
“Oh, Rabbit,” she said, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Whoever you choose to be, I love you. You are the stars, and I choose you. All of you.” She pressed her hand over my heart. I covered it with mine.
“Help me remember. Help me see the whole sky,” I whispered.
She pressed her brow against mine. I closed out everything butthe two of us. The spirit of the Fold was bright in her, and it burned away the shadows. For a moment, I could see it all—the whole sky, my whole soul, an infinity of glimmering black.
We’ve been dreaming so long, a voice whispered, and it was my own.It’s time to wake up.
All I knew was the dream—the dream of being Helen. If I woke up, everything would change. I would change. But as long as Bryony was with me, I could bear it. I had to. Otherwise, all of this had been in vain. Jessamine. Haley. Mom.
I woke—and I remembered.
34
THE MEMORIES WEREnot a flood but a soft summer rain across my skin, droplets that flowed and coalesced slowly. They sank into me and shuddered with the power of them. There was so much. Too much. And it changed everything.
“What is it?” Bryony asked. I shook my head. I couldn’t tell her, not yet—there were too many pieces still missing.
“She’s beginning to remember,” Eli said, and we jumped to our feet. He stood in the doorway wearing a heavy coat and carrying a rifle, slung over his shoulder by a strap. Bryony sprang forward, ready to defend me.
“Don’t,” I said. “He’s on our side. I think.”
“I always was,” Eli said. “May I come in?”
“If you must,” Bryony said with icy suspicion.
He tucked his hands into his pockets and looked around. “This place isn’t what it used to be, is it?” He looked so much like his brother, I thought. It was almost as if Leopold’s figment had appeared, except for the fact that we could see Eli clearly.
“What do you want?” Bryony asked.
“A question I’ve asked myself often,” Eli said. He gave a weary sigh and sank into the one rickety chair, setting the rifle downbeside him. “You’ll forgive me if I sit. These old bones don’t bear what they used to.”
Bryony opened her mouth, expression angry, but I put a restraining hand on her arm. Eli leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and continued.
“Once upon a time, I wanted all that Harrow offered. Power. Money. The ability to influence the minds of whoever I wanted. But then I fell in love. My family found out, and my ambitions vanished like smoke.”
“You mean that it occurred to you that maybe what your family was doing was kind of fucked up?” Bryony asked, unsympathetic. I stayed behind her. I’d heard this story before, hadn’t I?
“Much like Caleb, at first I imagined that I could simply fix the problems with Harrow without giving up our grip on the Other,” Eli continued. “I dove into research, trying to uncover everything I could about how Raymond and Vaughan had originally bound the Other in the hopes of engineering a method that didn’t require blood sacrifice.”
“You failed,” I said. “You kept trying, though. You were sure you were close.”
He nodded. “In the midst of my research, Leopold’s bastard was born. I’d seen the way he used that woman, then cast her aside like trash. At first, I just meant to check in on her—it seemed like the least the family could do. But then Haley started getting older, and...” He trailed off.
“You were the one that was always visiting. You were the one that sent all those gifts,” I said. “Her sister thought she saw Leopold, but it was you.”
