Sister Seeker

by Shelby Hailstone Law

  There was something amazing about being out in the ocean. I could reach out to it, and I could feel how much power was surging through it. I could feel that same power in the waves beneath my feet—even more keenly than my family could feel it, though I know they understood what a force of nature they were dealing with every time we went out into the water.

  I loved it. I loved to feel that power. I loved the feeling of pitching myself into the vast depths and riding the waves. I’d always loved the water, even hundreds of years ago when I didn’t have a family to surf with. I loved the ships that dared to venture out into the water. I loved to watch the tides.

  I grinned over at Tim as soon as the ride was over. “Go again?” I called out.

  “You’re on.”

  When I left the memory, I was smiling, and so was Theresa. We hadn’t re-entered the physical world yet, either, so the hug she gave me radiated warmth through my whole soul.

  “I hope we can find more memories like that,” she told me. “I hate thinking that King William has been able to take something away from you that you truly enjoyed. It’s just one more way that he tried to reshape you and take away your identity, and I won’t stand for it.”

  “I’m just glad you thought to look at something like that,” I pointed out. “I didn’t make the connection between drowning and my own identity.”

  “The ocean must have been a big part of who you used to be,” Theresa mused. “You’ve been able to remember some things organically, haven’t you? Santo said that you remembered family car trips when you were driving out here. And the ocean is so vast and so ever-present that it would be hard to keep you from remembering who you used to be when you encountered it—unless he drowned out those good memories with worse ones.”

  “Dear old Dad,” I quipped, though even in my mind, the dark humor came across as caustic.

  “But you’ve definitely made a dent,” Lila pointed out, drawing my attention her way—and to the monolith next to her. She had one hand over a long crack in the gray structure—deeper and longer than any of the chips that she and I had managed to pull off on our own. “Theresa was right; the more you get to memories at the core, the better equipped we are to fight this.”

  “The problem will be finding the core,” Theresa agreed. “This memory block isn’t naturally part of your personality and soul, so we can’t simply ask who you are at your core and look for corresponding memories. This is something your father constructed—and so he chose the order of memories and which ones to hide deeper than others.” She shook her head. “He might not have gone through each memory individually, but there are broader themes in his choices that we can follow.” She paused and seemed to take a moment to find the right words to explain her train of thought. “If I were to ask you what memories you had of Aaron, you wouldn’t just pick one and focus on it. You’d have plenty to choose from, and you would probably think of several at once before you decided on one to talk to me about, right?”

  I nodded.

  “This is that same concept in action. Your memories of your love of the water all come to mind together, so they can be grouped together. Your memories of certain family members can also be grouped together. King William doesn’t have to know every detail—he only has to know enough. From there, he can hide your core from you, without spending too much effort in any individual feeling or memory.”

  I nodded. I thought I could understand that much. Theresa had a way of explaining mental magic that made the whole process seem almost logical, something no other witch had been able to do for me before. “Okay, so we find more memories like that, and before you know it, I can actually remember things again, right?”

  Theresa nodded. “Exactly.” She paused to rest her hand on the monolith. “But we should take a break. Whenever I’ve worked with broken minds and souls, I’ve always found that it’s better to rest between sessions. Even human minds form defenses if you cause them too much trauma. Repression, regression, emotional reactions—I don’t want to sacrifice your mental health for the sake of your memory.”

  I frowned at that. “I want to keep going.”

  “Michelle, in the outside world, we’ve only been in your mind for a few seconds,” Theresa said gently. “There’s no rush while we’re in here. And I’d rather err on the side of caution than risk harming you any further. Your father has already done you such damage.”

  “Besides,” Lila added before I could argue—and I was about to—“you don’t want to spend too much time in your own mind and drift away from your life.”

  Theresa pointed Lila’s way to acknowledge her point. “Right. I’ve seen too many people get lost in the past.” She paused. “Or the future.”

  That was hard to argue when I had seen the way Theresa’s sister lived on her own plane of existence. It couldn’t have been easy for Theresa to watch that, so I couldn’t blame her for trying to keep others from that kind of fate. So my protests died on my tongue, and I simply nodded.

  The next thing I knew, I could feel that same warm invitation from before as Theresa exited my mind and beckoned me to follow her. But before I did, I shot one last glance Lila’s way.

  I didn’t have to say anything or even properly form the thought to talk to her. She met my gaze before I could speak and smiled softly. “I’ll keep working on this,” she promised, running her hand over the long crack in the monolith. “I’m in your mind all the time. It doesn’t matter as much if I’m lost in here. You can always find me when you and Theresa come back.”

  I rushed over to pull Lila into a long hug. “I love you too. You know that, right?”

  Lila returned the hug just as tightly before we finally broke apart. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Michelle—and not merely because we share a mind,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Trust me: I’m going to do everything I can to help you.”

  “Take a break if you need to,” I said. “Don’t feel like you have to keep working all the time because you live in here. You’re not just the little helper that lives in my brain, you know.”

  Lila broke into a laugh at that description. “I might not be, but now I want to hear you describe me that way to people you meet!”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, shooting a wider grin her way before I finally followed Theresa out of my mind.

  The scene hadn’t changed much from the way things had been before we went into my mind, but I immediately realized that Theresa was right: I could easily get lost in the kind of work we were doing. The breakfast setup, the way Andrew had his arm around Elaine’s shoulders—all of it was so different from the scene in my mind and the memories I’d seen that I had to remind myself that this was reality.

  I think, to some extent, I’d always had that reaction to coming back to reality out of my own mind. When Ryan had been in my mind and when my father and Christopher had forced me into my memories, I’d struggled then, too. But my focus had been on the fact that my father’s spell was meant for me to get stuck in my own head, and I had assumed that my difficulty reintegrating with the real world came from that spell.

  I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that the spell was playing on an existing framework in my own perception.

  Theresa was already stretching—an obvious physical cue to let the others know she’d left my mind—so when I looked around, Elaine smiled my way. “How did it go?”

  I had two ways to answer that. I could tell her the specifics of the memory we’d unearthed, or I could focus on the monolith. The personal and the tactical. No wonder Andrew was always torn between those two aspects of himself. The more time I spent in the Rendezvous, the more I felt the tug of both options.

  But Elaine was my cousin. More than that, she had always made a real effort to show her interest in my past—and celebrate even the smallest successes with me. Besides, I wasn’t raised to be a soldier like Andrew was. I was my own person. And that person was a family woman.

  I brushed a hand through my hair and gave Elaine a ti
red smile. “Apparently, I used to be a cute little surfer girl.”

  “No, really,” Andrew said, his smile widening and crinkling his eyes, so I knew it was a genuine one.

  “Really,” I said, matching his expression—after all, those smiles were rare, especially from him. But then, I let that smile die as I explained: “Theresa thinks that’s why my father drowned me for torture. I have such strong memories of the ocean and spending time out in it with my family that he had to force trauma on me to keep the water from sparking a natural memory and overriding the block he put in my mind.”

  “Huh,” Elaine breathed out, though her expression was a lot more horrified than that single word could express.

  Andrew, on the other hand, nodded slowly. “That actually makes sense,” he said. “You’ve been able to remember bits and pieces on your own. And didn’t you say you were dreaming about your past before you joined the Rendezvous?”

  I nodded, but before I could say anything, Tara looked up, a tight almost-smile on her lips. “The soul can never be dominated, but it can be broken,” she said in a whisper. “But even in pieces, it struggles and fights and maintains its own independence.”

  Theresa put a hand over her sister’s. “Exactly,” she said before she turned my way. “You’ve been fighting this whole time, even if a lot of your struggle has been unconscious. My job isn’t to hand you a victory; I’m here to give your soul the tools to fight and to show you the way.”

  “How do you know so much about this kind of thing?” I asked. I mean, I knew from what Tony had told me that Theresa was a talented soul witch. But I also knew from Andrew’s reaction to my attempt to heal Izzy and from everything Elaine had told me about witch society that magic was supposed to be an individual thing. Minds and souls were supposed to stay separate from each other, and anyone who broke those rules was like my father—cruel and evil and fighting against the way the world was supposed to work. At least according to the Rendezvous.

  Not that I believed things were that black and white, mind you. I had broken plenty of rules long before I met Elaine—and even continued to break them after I met her. But I had always sort of assumed that was because I was a Halfsie, learning by trial and error. I didn’t know the rules I was breaking until I broke them. But other witches? If they went against the pattern, they did so because they felt they had no other choice, right?

  I’d met other witches, like Sarah and Ryan, who bent the rules, but always with caveats. Sarah didn’t go in my mind; she only scanned it to help me understand the spell better. And while Ryan didn’t equivocate on his rule-breaking, he also left me feeling deeply uncomfortable and distrustful, so I didn’t exactly consider him a gold standard of what a witch could be.

  Theresa was different. She seemed to take minds and souls and magic in her stride in a way that no one I’d seen before could do. And now that I finally thought I could trust her, my curiosity had moved on from “why should I trust you?” to “why are you so good at this?”

  I didn’t articulate all of that—I couldn’t—but Theresa seemed to understand the nature of my question. She met my gaze seriously with her head inclined to one side before she answered: “Every witch has a talent, and this has always been mine. I know it doesn’t conform to the rigid style of magic that’s popular lately, but I’ve never felt that we should be separate from each other. Even though each life force around us is different, there’s an energy that binds us all together. Not everyone can see it, but I can.”

  “Both of us were born with sight,” Tara said in a tone filled with affection as she squeezed Theresa’s hand. “Sight beyond comprehension. Outside of the bounds of narrow-mindedness and order. The forces beyond our control defy order, and yet we still try to impose it on them.”

  “Theresa believes in the old ways of doing things,” Tony put in when Elaine looked like she might try to argue with Tara’s pronouncement. That way, Tony could put the focus back on Theresa herself and not a philosophical debate. “And since your father and the Family seem to be using the old ways to their advantage, too—using blood magic, breaking into minds, treating lives like energy to be consumed—Theresa is the perfect counterpoint.”

  “Then why study it?” I had to ask. “If it’s that bad—”

  “The misuse of knowledge is bad,” Theresa interrupted me. “Understanding how minds, souls, lives, and the forces around us all work together in the synergy we call ‘magic’ isn’t a bad thing.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Besides,” she said in a softer tone than before, “Tara has always said there was a reason she and I were born with the gifts we have in the time we were born. I always took that to mean I needed to know how to fight back against people misusing the kind of magic I understand—and I think the fact that you are sitting before me now asking for my help proves me right.”

  I raised my eyebrows and turned toward Tara, but she was gone again, watching something that wasn’t happening yet as she absently traced a pattern on the wood table in front of her. So, I turned back to Theresa, not bothering to hide my curiosity. “How long has she been. . . .”

  “She officially took on her duties with Time when she was twenty,” Theresa said—and this time, no one could mistake the wistful, almost bitter tone in her voice. I knew that, in the long lifespan of a witch, twenty years was next to no time at all, so I couldn’t imagine watching someone I loved lose themselves to Time so completely and getting to spend so little time with them.

  But then, Theresa surprised me, adding, “But Tara has been close to Time since we were born. She prophesied about our powers when we were barely out of our first decades.”

  “Wait.” My head dropped forward. “What?”

  Theresa smiled sadly. “We always knew she’d be a Future Seeker,” she said, once again squeezing her sister’s hand. “Our parents wrote down some of her earlier prophecies, and they all came true. We all knew that Time had plans for her.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that, but I knew I hated everything about that idea, so I reached out to Theresa to put my hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”

  But she shook her head. “Don’t be. We’ve managed all these years, and I wouldn’t trade my sister for anyone else.”

  “Previous things are stepping stones. The path ahead is much brighter than the stones that are scuffed by your use,” Tara added, and Theresa nodded along.

  “Exactly,” she said, as if the rest of us understood the proverb-laden speech from Tara the same way she did. “There’s no point looking back when there’s still so much to do. And everything we’ve had to endure has only made us stronger and better able to help.” She tipped her head my way and gave me a pointed look. “Power is a gift and a burden, as Tara likes to say.”

  It’s practically the mantra of Future Seekers, Lila added. All of us have the power to influence history as it’s made, but we have to give up so much for that influence.

  I still don’t see how you can think that it’s anything but slavery.

  We all had the chance to say no—with very few exceptions, like Tara, Lila assured me. Time doesn’t want an unwilling vessel. Time wants someone who will jump at the chance to help.

  Or someone who’s not going to fight back.

  Michelle. Lila’s tone was sharp.

  Lila, I shot back, mimicking her tone.

  I could feel her urge to roll her eyes in the fact that I almost made that very gesture. This is one fight that you’re going to have to admit you don’t understand fully. It’s hard to explain to people who have only experienced Time in a linear, demanding fashion—but those of us that are Future Seekers don’t see it the way you do.

  You’ve said that.

  Then respect my experience and believe me.

  I pressed my lips tighter together. I knew the rebuke for what it was, and I knew I should listen. But to be honest, my mind was hurting, my emotions were a wreck, and I was completely exhausted. This wasn’t the time for philosophical debates—this wa
s the time for a nap.

  “I’m going to take a power nap,” I announced as I got to my feet.

  Andrew raised an eyebrow. “You just got started.”

  “Be fair,” Theresa said gently. “We spent ages in her mind. To us, it’s been a long day already. I was thinking of taking some time to myself before I did anything else.”

  I gestured Theresa’s way. “See? Perfectly normal reaction.”

  “Yeah, well, forgive us for being worried about you and your health,” Aaron said. “You’ve had a shorter fuse since what happened in Iceland, you know.”

  I think if that statement had come from anyone but Aaron, I would have snapped back, the way I’d been doing to everyone else. I’d already bitten Elaine’s head off for keeping a relatively small secret (or at least, one that was small now that I knew the circumstances) and snapped at Lila. But even if my feelings for Aaron had changed, I still found it difficult to get angry with him.

  So instead of snapping back, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be an emotional lightning rod.”

  “No worries, ‘Chell,” Aaron promised. “Just work on feeling better, alright?”

  “Things might be uncomfortable for a while yet,” Theresa warned. “This kind of work is going to open up all sorts of memories and emotions and states of mind.” When I looked tired already after hearing that, she gave me a warm smile as reassurance. “Don’t worry; it won’t last. But I know it’s got to be exhausting and confusing in the meantime. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be,” I said, shaking my head and forcing a smile, even though I could feel exhaustion taking over in the way my eyelids felt like someone wanted to paperclip them shut. “It’s my problem, not yours.”

  Theresa looked like she might say something and then thought better of it, shaking her head and waving her hand. “Rest well. As soon as you’re awake, we’ll try this again.”