“Unfortunately, exactly what Goose just said.”
“No,” she says. Closes her eyes.
“He showed us something—”
“He’s dead,” she says, the pitch of her voice rising. “I was at his funeral.”
“I know—”
“Then what is this? Some sort of sick—”
“Listen,” Goose says, his tone as serious as I’ve ever heard it. “I’m newer at this than the rest of you. I don’t know how this shite works. But we both saw him.” He indicates me. “Together.”
“What did he look like, then?” she challenges me.
“He looked like he did when I found his body,” I say, then warn her. “Think, seriously, before you ask me to tell you more.”
The spark of anger dies out in her eyes.
“What was his ability?” Goose asks her.
“He . . .” Ceridwen starts, then bites her lip. “He could . . . put thoughts in your head? Leave imprints there, with what he wanted to say.” She swallows hard. “Messages.”
Goose raises his brows.
“I think he wanted me to know that we’re related,” I say. “He showed us a family tree.”
“What? In your house somewhere?”
“In a book,” I begin. “It’s . . . hard to describe.” Without sounding mad. “But then the images he showed me opened a door into something else, something only I could see. Memories I’d . . .” Inherited? “Forgotten,” I settle on.
The word is barely out of my mouth before Ceridwen swerves around me to throw open her door. She starts down the corridor at a trot.
“What’s happening?” Goose asks out of the corner of his mouth as we hurry to catch up.
“Dunno.”
“Our stuff’s back there—”
“Really?”
Ceridwen rounds a corner to the right, and then another. She glances over her shoulder, once, and shouts, “Keep up!” Then vanishes down a staircase.
Two flights down and we’re beneath the arcading. The Front Court and gate are on one side. On the other, a dark garden surrounded by a smaller cluster of old stone buildings with leaded-glass windows.
We’re the only people out. Something splashes in a nearby pond, and then I hear Ceridwen’s voice up ahead, to the right.
“I need you,” she says. “I need you to do this for me.”
“Ceri—”
Isaac’s voice. I stop Goose, and motion for him to be quiet.
“Please.”
“I can’t miss the last bus.”
“It’s not the last.”
“The last of the night.”
“So stay with me, and take my bike in the morning.”
“He won’t want it.”
“I think he does. Just talk to him. Please,” she says again, and then her tone changes from plea to command. “You owe me.”
Silence. Then two pairs of footsteps on grass, one light and soft, the other quick and heavy.
Isaac and Ceridwen walk out of a courtyard side by side.
“Ceridwen says you have a memory problem,” Isaac says to me. “Is she right?”
I nod.
“Fine. Let’s talk.”
He refuses to go back to her room, though, so the four of us meander our way through one of Emma’s several gardens as Isaac keeps an eye out for a place to sit.
“He’s quite particular,” Goose says.
“Walls have ears,” Isaac says. “Especially in places like this.” Before either of us can ask what he means, he says, “Watch out for the ducks.”
“What—”
Goose stumbles, setting off a racket of wings and quacking. “Bloody hell.”
“Told you,” we hear Isaac say from somewhere up ahead. His voice sounds muffled, his footfalls heavier. “Right,” he says, and then I see him, but just barely. He’s standing in a small copse of trees, off the path and far out of the glow of lampposts.
“How clandestine,” I say, looking above us at the sky, dark as spilled ink. “I’m not sure anything I have to say merits this level of intrigue.”
“I told you he wasn’t interested,” Isaac says to Ceridwen.
“Wait,” I say. “All right. What is it you want to know?”
“What do you want to tell me?”
“You really do sound like him,” I say.
“Your friend?”
A single shake of my head. “The professor.”
I didn’t mean it as an accusation, exactly, but the air shifts, and Isaac’s tone changes. “I’m not like him.”
I could let it go, but I don’t. “You’re always moving,” I point out. “You show up wherever and whenever you like to offer cryptic warnings and dire predictions.”
“I’ve learned from him, sure. But I’m not like him.”
It’s Ceridwen who asks him, “What’ve you learned?”
I think the only reason he deigns to answer is because she’s the one who asked. He bites his lip before saying, “Some of the things I’ve tried to pass along to you. Don’t stay in any one place for long. Don’t touch anyone you don’t trust.”
“Don’t trust anyone at all?” I ask.
“I trust some people,” he says, his eyes on Ceridwen as he speaks. “Not many, though.” Then, “The professor’s the oldest one of us, I think. How do you think he got that way?”
“Knowing the future probably helps.”
Isaac cracks a rare grin. “In some ways, yeah, sure. But think about it—what would you do if you knew the future?”
“That would depend on what it looked like,” I say.
“What if you thought you could create it?” I can feel his eyes on me in the dark. “What would the future look like, if you believed you could shape it?”
“We can, though,” Goose says. “Everything we do changes the future. Every action has a reaction.”
Isaac’s nodding. “But you don’t know what the reactions will be, and you can only control how you act.”
“Isn’t it the same for the professor?” Ceridwen asks.
Isaac and I answer at the same time. “No.” We look at each other.
“He uses people,” Isaac says first. “Gives them a taste of what they want and dangles it in front of them until they dance.” He glances at my pendant. “That’s what that means,” he says to Ceridwen. “Shaw’s a puppet.”
I stiffen. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Ceridwen said you’re having memory problems,” he says evenly.
I should say yes, but instead I say, “So?”
“Too many or too few?”
I avoid his eyes. “Both.”
“He got a message from Sam,” Ceridwen says. “After he died.”
A beat. Then, “Thought you said your abilities were gone.”
“I’m not sure mine is,” Goose cuts in. “I saw Sam, too.”
Ceridwen looks at Isaac. “Could he be alive, somehow, you think?”
Isaac looks at me expectantly, though I’m certain he knows the answer.
I exhale. “I didn’t just see him die. I felt him . . .”
Shit. Least I caught myself before adding anything too gruesome?
“I’m sorry.” I shake my head. “There’s no way.”
“So why track down Ceridwen?” Isaac asks me. I’m still stung by the puppet insult, though, so it’s Goose who answers.
“You said his Gift let him imprint a thought in someone’s mind, right?”
She nods. Then amends, “Not just from person to person. He could imprint them on things.” She turns to us. “Tell Isaac what you told me. About the family tree.”
I do. I recount the scene, and Isaac makes Goose do the same.
“Well, you didn’t witness a memory,” Isaac says finally.
“How do you know?”
“Because the details would be different. Little things, stuff people don’t even think about. It’s subconscious. Hard to lie about.”
“So?”
“So I think
you’re right. It was a message, not a memory.”
“What was the message saying, though?”
Isaac lifts his chin. “That depends on what you saw next.”
“I saw my great-great-grandfather.”
“Why?”
Because I’d been asked to? Because I finally allowed myself to? “How should I know?”
“Why do you think?”
“You sound like a therapist.” I let out a breath, not sure how much to reveal. We hardly know him, after all. “Genetic memory, I suppose?”
“That’s a how, not a why.”
“He’s on a mission to confront his past,” Goose narrates, “so he can find a way to . . . move forward.”
At that, Isaac raises his brows.
“A Bildungsroman situation,” I add. “Deeply unsublimating.”
“So you decided to come back to England to confront your past,” Isaac says drily. “All on your own.”
He’s said he’d never met a Mara, or an “Em.” Best not bring her up just yet; stick with what he already knows. “The professor left me a note, at or after my father’s funeral, basically congratulating me on my inheritance. And then in the envelope was a ripped-out page from somewhere—an encyclopaedia, maybe, who the fuck knows—about priest holes.”
“Wait,” Ceridwen says. “Priest holes?”
“The family manor was constructed before the Reformation.”
Her mouth falls open and her eyes narrow as she realises, “You’re that Shaw, are you? I’ve been to your manor on a school trip. State school,” she adds snarkily.
I sigh.
“So you think—or, wait, this professor chap thought there was something hidden away in the priest holes in your house? What did you find, when you looked?” she asks us.
I didn’t. I ignored his subtle attempt to get me to look, and spent most of my energy ignoring M’s unsubtle ones. Instead, “We didn’t exactly get that far . . .” I begin, looking to Goose for help. “There was a bit of a detour.”
“Also, completely thrown by the ghost thing, to be honest.”
“Had to get the fuck out of there after that happened.”
“Had to,” Goose echoes. “To be fair,” he adds, “you were fucking pissed at the time.”
Ceridwen glares at both of us. “Should have led with that, maybe?”
“Pissed?” Isaac asks.
“Fucked up.”
“I know what it means. On what?”
“Honestly, I don’t even know.”
His eyes narrow slightly, but he tells me, “Go on.”
I shrug. “Then I saw the unillustrious Lord Simon Shaw in a hospital, barely conscious. The professor showed up and saved his life.”
After I say the words, I realise just how still Isaac is as he listens to me. “Try again,” he says.
“Pardon?”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not—”
“How did the professor save Simon Shaw’s life?” he asks again.
“I—” I’m fighting to remember the details, suddenly. Blurred shapes and shadowed voices . . . “There were two men with him.” Tall? Short? One of each, I think? Their names are just out of reach. “One of them did something to him.” I can’t remember what it was, anymore. Not at all. It feels like a staircase in a house I’ve always lived in is now missing one of its steps, and I only noticed because I’ve stumbled through it.
“You said Simon talked about needing more time,” Goose cuts in. “He asked the professor for the man who could give him more life.”
His words pluck a familiar string somewhere in my mind, but the note’s too far away to recognise.
“Different memory,” I say. “They talked about going on some kind of voyage, to discover something . . .” Someone? “In India.”
“India,” Isaac repeats. He swallows hard. “That’s interesting.”
Goose arcs an eyebrow, giving me a sidelong glance.
“Is it?” I ask. “Why?”
“The professor thought I could learn something there myself. Find someone.”
“Learn what?” Goose asks.
“Find who?” I ask perfunctorily, because I’m certain I already know.
“You’ve heard the gods and monsters bit, right?”
I nod, Goose nods, but Ceridwen’s shaking her head, rather angrily. “Why don’t I know what you’re all on about? Why am I the only one who doesn’t know?”
“Far from the only one,” Goose says. “I only heard weeks ago.”
“But you knew,” Ceridwen says to Isaac.
“We didn’t know each other all that well, when I was in New York.”
“Well enough,” she says, and if this were a normal night and we were with normal people, that would be the moment that Goose and I backed away slowly.
As it is, though. We bite our tongues.
“I didn’t trust—” Isaac catches himself before saying a name, but it would’ve been Leo’s name, I’m sure of it. “I didn’t trust everyone there.”
“I was there,” Ceridwen says. “What’s changed?”
“Me,” Isaac says.
Clever, clever man. Cleverer still, he changes the subject, from one that’s clearly about them and only them, back to one that includes me and Goose.
“The professor has a few speeches he recycles,” Isaac says, his voice softening when he looks at Ceridwen. “In one of them, he says there’s a monster for every god, a demon for every angel, a villain for every hero.”
Hero. I can’t help but hear it in my father’s sneer, and remember what he believed it meant I should do.
“Then he name-checks a philosopher—Jung and Euhemeris are particular favourites—and presents the idea that we, the Gifted, are the gods and monsters of myth and legend. All of the stories were written about people like us, with abilities normal people didn’t have the language to explain.”
“Maybe there’s an obvious answer I’m missing,” Goose says, “but how do you know he has speeches? Were you . . . recruiting for him, or something?”
Isaac shakes his head. “The opposite, almost always. My blessing,” he says nastily, “is that I can restore memories, and delete them.” He inhales. “My curse is that when I do, I either gain someone else’s, or lose one of my own.”
“Shit,” is all I seem to be able to say.
“Hard luck, mate,” Goose mumbles.
“Or that’s how it started, anyway. It used to be worse, actually, when I had less control over it. That was when the professor found me. It was after I’d moved to Brooklyn, met some of the others already. The professor came calling and hinted at the idea that if I could trace some of those stories and legends back, it might help me find someone who could, as he put it, ‘heal you of your Affliction.’ And when someone shows up offering you the thing you want most, how can you say no?”
That’s what Mara wanted, once.
“Fix me,” she commanded. “This thing, what I’ve done—there’s something wrong with me, Noah. Fix it.”
The look on her face broke my heart. “I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because you aren’t broken.”
I was wrong. We were both broken.
“That’s what you wanted most?” Ceridwen asks, wrenching me back into the present. “That’s why you left?”
“They don’t get it,” Isaac says, but not to Ceridwen, or Goose. He looks at me, speaks to me, as if I’m the only one there. “They’re not constantly aware of their blessings, the way we are, so they don’t feel their curses as keenly.”
Ceridwen doesn’t approve of that answer. “That’s not fair—”
“Go on, Shaw,” he says. “Explain it.”
I look at him questioningly, until I realise what he means. Then I say, “No.”
“Okay, I will. When Sam jumped off the bell tower at his father’s funeral, Noah didn’t just feel the noose as if it were around his own neck. Or his bones snapping like they were in his own b
ody. Or the air being squeezed out of his lungs like someone was wringing them out like a wet rag.”
Ceridwen goes completely pale.
Isaac doesn’t stop. “He felt the fear and terror Sam felt before he jumped, and kept on feeling it until he died.”
I feel like hitting him, is what I feel like. “How do you know,” I say, my voice low.
“I didn’t. I guessed. I was proving a point.”
“You’re an arsehole,” Ceridwen says.
I agree.
“True, but irrelevant right now.”
“Is it?” Goose asks.
Isaac shrugs. “All right.” He looks at Ceridwen. “Ask him yourself, then. I’ll do it, no matter what he says.”
Ceridwen blinks, surprised.
“Ask me what?”
She takes a deep breath. “Do you want to remember? Or do you want to forget?”
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I’M NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND the question.”
Isaac shoots Ceridwen a pointed look.
She chooses her words carefully. “You said you came here to find me because of Sam, right? He showed you something, something Goose didn’t see, and he wouldn’t have shown you what he did if it wasn’t important. But just now, when Isaac asked, you couldn’t remember the details.” She looks at Isaac, then me. “He can help.”
Isaac’s already shaking his head, though. “She’s right and wrong. I could give you your memories back, the details. It’ll be rough, but I could probably do it. What I can’t do is help you.” He pauses. “Because I don’t think remembering will help you.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve only ever heard someone describe a memory the way you did once. And that’s because an original was in it. From what you’ve told me it sounds like there were three of them in there, at least.”
Four, if you count M.
“They’re crawling all over you.”
An unsettling thought, and description.” It wasn’t me they were talking to, though—”
“Doesn’t matter. Most of the Carriers I’ve met—”
“That’s the word Kells used for us,” I say, eyes narrowing. “Carriers.”
“Yeah, she was a scientist, and to her that’s what we are. To the professor, with his mystical shit, we’re Gifted, or whatever. It doesn’t matter what they call us, it matters what we are. And what we are is different. From them, from everyone else, and from each other.” He takes a deep breath. “Most people like us, they’ve never heard of him, let alone met him, the professor. He shows up in person, or sends a letter, or skulks around offscreen to manipulate us like pawns on a chessboard we don’t even know we’re walking on.”
The Reckoning of Noah Shaw Page 19
